Wasted Time
by Entrance Denied
Summary: "I know it seems weird for me to bring you clothes when you woke up naked in a clearing but you're always naked when you time travel and I know how much more secure you feel if you have something covering your exposed-" But I'm no longer listening to him. Did he just say…He couldn't have just said...time travel...Sasunaru. Canonverse.
1. The First Time

_AN: Greetings and welcome to the first instalment of 'Wasted Time', I do hope you enjoy yourselves while you are here. There are a few things to note before you delve into the insanity of this story. The first and most important thing to note is that this story is based off of 'The Time Traveller's Wife' by Audrey Niffenegger except it's a horribly bastardised version mutilated heinously and without regret to fit in with the canonverse of Naruto heh. Of course, I have nothing to do with the rights to 'The Time Traveller's Wife' or 'Naruto' but I highly recommend both of them because they're great._

_The second thing to note is that this is a Sasunaru story possibly with some yaoi scenes in some distant future so a fair warning for that before you go on in case you're not into that sort of thing._

_The third thing to note is that for the most part, I will be posting the ages of the characters before each break in the story, excluding the parts where it's painfully obvious, so you can sort of keep up with whereabouts in time Sasuke has travelled to and how old everyone is. It's done in the same way as the novel version of 'The Time Traveller's Wife' so I take no credit for this genius either. If anyone is confused at any point then please feel free to message me and I'll respond to answer any questions and change things as far as I can to clarify everything. _

_The fourth and I think last thing to note is that this takes place just before Sasuke goes off to kill his brother. Everything up until then remains the same as the manga but as the time travelling thing starts to mess things up, certain events will change…quite dramatically…so a warning for that too. _

_Apart from that, off you go into the wild blue yonder fair reader and please, don't forget to leave a review when you're done._

* * *

**Wasted Time  
**

_Time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time - John Lennon_

**1: The First Time  
**

Contrary to what I constantly tell myself and others, I never was able to truly forget about them.

Occasionally, when I sleep and my dreams aren't plagued with re-runs of the past traumas of my life, I remember certain experiences that I had with them back when I tried to delude myself about how I thought life could be and it's almost like nostalgia.

I remember how irritatingly marked Sakura's attentions were, how she used to stand so close that her fingers would brush the edges of my hands and when I glared at her, she would make out like it was all an innocent accident. I remember how Kakashi used to read his book like we were of no interest to him at all, yet when either me or Naruto managed to do something particularly impressive, his eye would crinkle to show his approval though it never left the words on the page.

And Naruto…

Of course I remember Naruto.

I remember how he would constantly surprise me when everyone else fell into the same mundane patterns of predictability. I remember how despite the fact that he had no natural talent and was dim-witted to boot, he was the only one that was ever able to match me, to provide a real challenge and take the true title of 'rival'. I remember the feeling of him pressed to my back in battle, knowing that I could count on him to protect me from that side just as he was trusting me to protect him.

I remember how he told me when we were balanced upon those logs on the water at the valley of the end that I was a precious bond he was finally able to make. That when he thought about the way we were, he imagined that it was something like brotherhood.

What would he know of brotherhood?

And inevitably, I remember the blue of his eyes…

* * *

_Sasuke is 16_

The fight has been long and hard, draining in ways that I didn't expect it to be. My sharingan has been active for almost 2 hours following the movements of our enemies and I'm starting to feel the bitter sting on the edge of my eyes, a forewarning that my vision will start to fail soon if I'm not careful. There are 6 of them in total, a group of shinobi that had no dealings with us until we launched an ambush at the opportune moment several miles outside their destination, a ruinous structure on a known path that stretches between the Fire country and the Wind Country.

I was expecting it to be a relatively difficult take down considering the importance of the scroll they're carrying but I couldn't predict that the fight would last this long.

I dodge a few well aimed kunai heavily laden with explosive tags and drop into a defensive crouch as they explode behind me, a repercussive boom pushing against my back and making my dark hair whip out in front of my eyes, effectively blinding me for a moment. On instinct, I fall out of my crouch and roll sideways along the recently rain-soaked grass, narrowly avoiding contact with an enemy jutsu that was thrown out after the explosion to take advantage of my momentary blindness.

A gasp from the enemy confirms that they weren't expecting me to dodge a second time and I smirk at how these idiots underestimate me.

It will be the last thing they ever do.

There's a momentary pause in the grapple as the enemy takes time to collect himself and I allow myself an analytical glance at the rest of the battle field, noting that Suigetsu is holding his own against 2 of them quite well, looking a little weary but full of fighting spirit. Karin is sitting on the ground behind him, her arm bleeding copiously and her face sporting the greyish pallor that people only seem to wear when they're trying not to pass out. I can see that the wound isn't too deep though so I decide to continue letting Suigetsu defend her. Juugo is situated on my other side shrieking wildly and running rampant at another 3 shinobi who keep having to take to the trees to avoid his curse mark enhanced strength. He doesn't need my help at all though he will need calming down after this is over.

I turn my attention back to the leader, glancing up at him in his hiding place, my face purposefully impassive.

I know that looking at him like this, through the cloak of stealth that he's chosen to try and adopt, will unnerve him. I'm just hoping he's as predictable as I think he is.

There's a sound behind us like a sickening crunch and I allow myself a small, barely perceptible smirk when an agonised cry follows that crunch, a cry hastily cut off as Juugo continues to plough into the enemy.

The colour of the leader's aura changes slightly, his chakra flow laced with the poisonous shade of defeat. I watch with unsurprised eyes as he reveals himself, a lanky individual with a wild mop of hair that reminds me a little of Naruto of all people. He's wearing a jounin vest though it's battered and ripped from battle and he's clutching a gash spewing out thick clots of dark blood. A present I gave him a few minutes ago when I lost my patience for a moment.

He glowers at me as he stands on swaying legs, his eyes sharp and focussed despite the obvious desire to simply pass out sitting at the forefront of his thoughts.

"Alright, alright," he snaps out brusquely as another strangled cry resounds through the forest from Suigetsu's direction. "You win alright? No more killing off my men…"

I stare at him intently for a few seconds, reading him whilst making sure that he has no way to read me. The sounds of battle continues to rage around us and I'm pleased when the muscles in his face move involuntarily, tensing as he clenches his jaw and then twitching in mild but steadily increasing panic.

I raise my hand only when I'm sure that he knows who is truly in the power spot now.

Suigetsu and Juugo catch my signal and ease up from their respective battles instantly. It takes a moment for the enemy to clock the ceasefire but once they've realised what's happened, they take the chance to retreat gratefully and move to safer ground. Once the enemy shinobi have dispersed leaving only the leader, we're met with blessed silence, a silence punctuated only by Juugo's laboured breathing as he tries to hold on to some semblance of rationality. I turn sharingan enhanced eyes on him and he stares at me intently. By the time I've turned back to engage the leader, his breathing has levelled off a little bit.

Taking my steady gaze as his cue, the enemy leader swallows nervously, his Adam's apple bobbing obviously in his throat, and reaches into the pouch strapped to his thigh. The scroll he reveals is thin and weather-worn but I can feel myself eyeing it with the sort of hungry gaze that Naruto used to call 'psychopathic'. My heart is hammering at about 100 miles per hour in my chest and, to accommodate my increased heart rate, I'm forced to take short sharp breaths. Blood pumps quickly through my system making my exposed fingers and toes tingle.

_So close…_

"You want this, I can see it in your eyes so…so I'll make a deal with you and give you the damned thing in exchange for my life and the lives of the rest of my men," the leader states carefully, his eyes reflecting suspicion as he tries to negotiate, his aura reflecting a deep rooted fear and a dull resignation in colours of grey and the darkest blue.

I breathe out slowly, considering. My eyes stay glued to his in intimidating nonchalance.

"Deal," I say eventually, my voice cutting through the tension in the air. I sound overtly arrogant and young next to this quivering shinobi and the contrast is actually a little sickening. It shouldn't have taken me this long to take out a group like this. Dallying here is just an unnecessary hindrance of progress.

_So. Close._

"Sasuke, dude, what the fuck?" Suigetsu asks from behind me, flailing madly to express just how unimpressed he is with my decision to agree to their demands. I don't bother gracing his outburst with a response. In all honesty, this fight has gone on long enough. If my team were competent, those men would have been dead an hour ago, I would have retrieved the scroll and we would have been well on our way towards Itachi. I have no interest in letting Suigetsu indulge in a killing spree just because he comes from the Hidden Mist and feels he should 'finish the job'. These ninja pose no real threat to us and there's no one they can tell to challenge us either.

_It's only a matter of time dear brother…_

"Give me the scroll," I tell the enemy before me, my mouth set into a thin, hard line. Behind me, Suigetsu tuts but doesn't complain further and the enemy's gaze remains level with mine.

_His eyes are blue but they're nothing like…_

He throws the scroll.

It's a simple toss done purposefully slowly with a high arc that will force me to avert my eyes from the enemy if I want to catch it. Initially, I'm unsure as to why he's bothered to do this when I have Suigetsu, Juugo and a half aware Karin to keep an eye on him while I focus on the object spinning wildly up in the stratosphere but as I leap up to catch it and my fingers brush against the rough paper, I understand.

There's a feeling like an impact in the base of my chest, like a fist has connected with my rib cage and has ploughed right through to my spinal cord. The air distorts in front of me and a ring of displaced air fans out like a shock wave. At the same time, my nervous system seems to process what has happened and pain rolls over me in one, huge, tsunami-like wave. It's agony like I've never experienced, even whilst consenting to some of Kabuto's more heinous experiments in the underground chambers of Orochimaru's hideouts.

At first, the pain is all I can feel and I let out an involuntary whimper against the diabolical feeling twisting my insides, crumpling in on myself and the scroll my hand has managed to close over in mid-air before falling unceremoniously towards the ground in freefall. As the air starts to whip past my face, I hear shouting from Suigetsu and Juugo below me and a scream from Karin.

Then the nausea comes, coiling up like some sort of fetid snake in my belly and wrapping around the pain, diluting it with a new feeling of discomfort. I try not to vomit whilst I fall and brace myself for impact with the hard Earth, only aware enough of my surroundings to thank whatever heathen deity that it rained recently and the ground will be softer than usual.

It comes as something of a surprise when I feel strong arms encompass me before my body meets with the dirt and for one wild, disorientated moment, I'm actually expecting to see either Kakashi or Naruto holding on to my quaking frame as I lean over and retch out the contents of my stomach onto the grass. When I find myself looking blearily up into Juugo's face, I have to fight not to scowl at myself.

Whenever I feel even slightly vulnerable, my thoughts always travel back to them…

It's not acceptable…

…but I don't know what else I can do to sever ties with them.

I turn my attentions to the leader currently engaged in a new grapple with Suigetsu and motion silently for Juugo to put me down, keeping myself upright despite the crippling stabs of agony cannonading through my system whenever I move.

I'm not exactly sure what that weird, undetectable jutsu on the scroll just did but if it was meant to kill me, it didn't work and now, I am well and truly furious.

I reach behind me with a shaking hand, my sharingan enhanced eyes on the enemy ninja, burning into his skin. As soon as the palm of my hand closes over the handle of my sword, the shaking stops and my feet feel more solidly kedged into the ground. Testing myself and my movements by shifting slightly, I take off across the damp earth and run a thread of chidori through the smooth metal of the blade I inherited from my time spent with Orochimaru.

My eyes are cold, black and full of the hatred my brother always accused me of lacking when I slice through his waiting flesh, sheathing the blade through his torso until it's sticking out of the other side dripping incarnadine blood and other poisons.

I allow myself a small, triumphant smirk when I realise that I've managed to pierce straight through the liver in my all-encompassing rage.

The enemy, who was about to make a wild stab at Suigetsu's neck with a kunai, pulls a face of utmost disbelief and terror, the kind of look all ninjas give when they realise that it's the end, and turns to me, his eyes widening almost comically as he takes in my smirk.

"You…" he splutters, blood bubbling at the corner of his mouth as his life ebbs away. "How did you-

"Survive that hidden jutsu?" I ask, my voice low and tainted with bitter ire.

As the last of the light leaves his eyes, just before he keels over on the brunt of my katana, his muscles twitching with the remnants of the chidori still exploding in minute bursts through his system, I lean in close, holding him upright with the blade and whisper:

"I'm an Uchiha."

He's dead by the time I've finished speaking, his eyes stuck fast open and empty like an abandoned crab shell. For a few minutes, I remain standing with him propped up on my blade trying not to throw up again, my stomach working violently against me.

Whatever that jutsu was, it seems to have scrambled my insides, my vital organs changing places until I can feel the beat of my heart pulsing unpleasantly in my gut and my lungs feel like they're full of acid.

"S-Sasuke?" Suigetsu's voice is tentative beside me and I have to fight the urge not to glare at him. It's not his fault I was hit by that weird jutsu, I can only blame myself. I was too eager to get my hands on the scroll…too eager and too close…

Would the enemy know why we were after it?

"You don't look so good," Suigetsu states after a while and I can no longer hold myself back, unleashing the full force of my glare upon him until he's reeling back with his hands raised in front of him, his back hitting a tree as he tries to get as far away from me as possible.

"W-what did that j-jutsu do to you?" Karin asks from her position on the ground. Since I managed to kill the enemy leader, she's managed to prop herself up against the base of a tree and is bandaging her arm as quickly and efficiently as she can by herself. My glare softens as I look at her actually being useful but then returns in full force when there's an excruciating convulsion somewhere inside me and my stomach tries to escape through my eye sockets.

It takes me a few seconds to find my voice through the pain but as I'm finding it, I make a point of tossing the new corpse off of my sword, determined not to show weakness.

"No time," I manage, half grunting my response. "The remaining enemy shinobi are probably still around here. They might not attack without their leader but I'm not willing to take the chance so I need you two to scout the area and kill anyone you find."

Juugo nods immediately, having appeared in his usual silent position beside me, and takes off into the trees. Suigetsu lingers, staring at me disbelievingly. It's not often that I ask him to kill and it's even less often that I change my mind about something. He opens his mouth like he's about to call me out on my sudden change of heart but one pointed look from me silences him and he takes off into the trees after Juugo.

As soon as I'm sure that they're far enough away, that our immediate area is free from the potential of enemy attack, I fall into a sitting position on the grass, breathing heavily and pulling at the ties still concealing the scroll's information with fumbling fingers.

A heaving grunt before me alerts me to the fact that Karin is trying to move to come and sit with me but I hold up a hand and fix her with a piercing expression.

"Stay there, I don't know how close you have to be to be effected by the jutsu," I tell her in such an authoritative tone that she pauses mid-rise, suddenly in an awkward half crouching, half standing position that makes her legs look like they're about to buckle. I ignore her expression of almost shock and instead concentrate on my heart beat which is pounding out a sickening rhythm in my already churning stomach.

I'm so excited I can barely breathe.

_I'm coming for you now brother. You can't run from me anymore._

Despite the hidden jutsu that had been wrapped neatly around the outside of the scroll, there are no more traps attached to it. Whatever that jutsu was, it was obviously extremely powerful and if I wasn't so involved with what I was doing, I would feel an intoxicating sense of smugness about how far my stamina has obviously come. Perhaps now I can say that I can take a hit as well as that infuriating…

I grip the edge of the paper between thumb and forefinger and unravel the scroll with a neat little flourish, scrutinising the ink on the paper with marked concentration.

Black characters glare up at me, a message in perfectly artistic handwriting…handwriting that I remember envying endlessly as a child.

The black ball of whatever it is that I am these days squirms inside me, drowning out the pain of the jutsu, the nausea, until there is nothing but the existence of that…_thing._

It's all I have left, all that I've cultivated…

…all that I am or can ever hope to be.

_'The old Uchiha settlement on the edge of the Fire Country. I'll see you there foolish little brother.'_

* * *

I want to go immediately. I want to haul my body up and start hurtling through the trees towards him. I know where he is, he's waiting for me and I'm as ready as I'm ever going to be but I'm not stupid enough to be blinded by my own furious ambition, not when I don't yet know the full effects of the jutsu I was hit with, though it's hard to call a halt to everything and set up camp.

I don't want to fight him with a handicap, it proves nothing.

We manage to make it a little way away from the area we finished the enemy shinobi in, a clearing surrounded by dense trees so it's not easily spotted from the various paths between countries. Due to the closely interwoven leaves of the trees closest to us, the grass is thin on the ground and the mounds of dirt are littered with sticks that'll make it difficult to sleep but at the moment, I don't care.

It takes a few hours for my stomach to settle and for the agonising pain to subside as well. It still feels like my insides have been scrambled, a weird sensation when not coupled with the pain a bit like the feeling of a pulled muscle but all over my body. I'm tight and a little clumsy but otherwise unfazed it seems.

Has my stamina really increased that much?

Doubtful.

"You want me to check for internal injuries?" Suigetsu asks, eyeing me warily as he pulls out some trail rations from his pack. It would be good to have a fire tonight after a successful mission and a spectacular furthering of my goals but I'm leery of the idea that there may be more enemies around, drawn to the last scene of conflict like moths to a flame and I don't want to risk attracting attention.

"Hn," I huff out by the way of an affirmative and pull my black vest over my head so he can have a look at the blooming black bruise on my chest, a rippling thing that looks like some awful tattoo gone wrong, the lines so blurry they're hardly lines anymore. The pattern is not unlike the seal I glimpsed on Naruto's stomach in the forest of death before Orochimaru did something to it and caused the idiot to lose consciousness. There is one concerning streak of bruise leading all the way up my chest to my neck and further into my scalp. Though I don't have a lot of medical knowledge, I can tell that something like that might cause further worry.

Suigetsu checks me over thoroughly with some help from Karin when she's able to hoist herself up and over to us. Both of them confirm that as far as they know, there doesn't seem to be any internal damage though they agree the odd pattern of the bruise is somewhat perplexing.

In a bold display, Karin lets her cold hands fall daintily onto my shoulders, the thumb on her right hand running over the sinuous curve of muscle there and I flinch at the touch, not really appreciating her proximity.

She looks at me then, her bright eyes desperate, hopeful and completely the wrong colour.

"Get off," I tell her crisply, moving my arms up to dislodge her hands and turning back to my shirt to fish out the prize scroll we collected from those idiots.

Since the jutsu went off, I haven't let any of the others touch this thing though I've checked it thoroughly with the sharingan and can sense nothing else on it. Karin has checked it too and has agreed there's nothing wrong with it but there's no point in taking chances. With deft hands, I pull the paper until the scroll is lying open on the damp ground, the ink burning into the back of my retinas every time I blink.

Because _he _wrote this message.

Because I'm so close.

Because the time and place for our final battle has been decided.

It's only as I'm scrutinising the character for 'see' one more time, staring at a flick at the bottom of the character that is unique only to Itachi that I feel the rush of vertigo, a sudden disconcerting pull of anxiety and dizziness that has me lifting my head to meet Karin's gaze, hoping she'll consent to me biting her arm to speed up the healing process following that battle.

What I find on her face is truly disconcerting, an expression of horror so intense that I'm forced to try and extend my senses through this weird feeling to try and find what could provoke such an emotive response from the girl that used to look after Orochimaru's prisons.

"S-Sasuke, your feet…" she whispers and my head whips down to stare at my shoes and the exposed, pale skin of my toes.

Except, my toes appear to be missing.

All at once I'm hit with a shot of liquid panic which spreads through my veins like a drug. Has someone thrown something that's cut off my toes? But surely they'd be lying in bloody stumps in front of my shoe rather than just…

I can still feel them but they're tingling, is this some sort of phantom sensation?

_Shit, what the hell is happening to me?_

_Stay calm Sasuke, rationalise. It's got something to do with the jutsu, a trick. Your toes are still there, reach down and touch them to confirm._

My eyes are slightly wide and my mouth is parted, the only indication in my facial expression of the shock I'm trying to suppress which is fighting to shut down the useful parts of my functioning system. With precise slowness, I reach down, shivering against the wind as an unpleasant sweat breaks out over my skin, trickling down the back of my neck and providing an unwelcome tickling sensation. By the time my hand has reached the space where my toes should be, the tingling has spread to the tips of my fingers and they've disappeared as well.

I stare at where my fingers should be as they pass through the place where my toes should be and I feel no connection, no subtle brush of finger on toe.

They're gone.

The shock struggling in my system takes this as a cue to explode into full vitality and within moments, I'm hyperventilating, watching in part fascination and part terror as my hand continues to disappear, simply fading until there's nothing but the sparse grass where my flesh should be.

"Suigetsu! JUUGO!"

Karin's voice splinters my thoughts and provokes a string of black spots to pass in front of my eyes, like I'm suddenly over-sensitive to any sort of harsh sound. I have to blink when I glance up and I can't focus on Karin's face. I open my mouth to inform her of this new development but instead of speaking, I make an involuntary noise in the back of my throat as the tingling begins to spread through the bruise on my torso in that strange spiralling pattern.

"Sasuke, Sasuke, what's happening to you?" Karin asks, her voice becoming muffled around the edges until it sounds like I'm underwater.

_What is happening to me?_

The last coherent thing I'm able to grasp before the spots in my eyes overtake everything is the sound of my arm guards hitting the grass as they fall from arms that are no longer there. Wherever my fingers and toes have gone, the rest of me seems to be following and though I feel a moment of burning, venomous regret twisting through me like a hot knife dragged through yielding flesh because I may be unable to fulfil my promised role as an avenger for my clan, I also wonder if wherever I'm going will offer something better than what I currently have, this black ball of hatred that my brother has so carefully nurtured within me.

_Wherever I'm going…I wonder…will there be someone like him?_

* * *

_Sasuke is 16, Naruto is 25_

Heat.

It's the first thing that registers, like a half formed realisation of some discomfort in the back of my mind forcing me to regain consciousness. I feel my eyebrows twitch in irritation against this discomfort but somehow, it sort of feels like someone else is performing the action using my body, like _I _am not actually attached to anything physical at all.

Did I fall asleep in the sun? I don't quite remember but that isn't unlike me. Orochimaru used to say that I was truly like something cold blooded with my peculiar habit of falling asleep in sun-dappled places. I never particularly felt like sharing the fact that since the death of my clan, it's always felt more natural to sleep during daylight hours when I'm more likely to be safe.

It takes me a while to find the will to pry my eyelids apart and when I do, the first thing I see is a pattern of thick, fan-shaped green leaves hanging high above me, filtering some of the light passing over my body, providing some shade so I don't burn in direct UV exposure.

_Fan-shaped leaves…_

I frown slightly as a soft breeze disturbs the foliage above me, watching the leaves tangle and brush against each other. The shadows covering the area around me suddenly look like reflections in water and that doesn't help the feeling of intense disorientation that has settled over my system.

_Where the hell am I? These types of leaves can only be found in the heart of the Fire Country, near Konoha…and why is it so hot? What happened to m-_

And I remember - sitting with Karin and suddenly parts of me starting to disappear. The tingling in my fingers and toes, phantom sensations from appendages that were no longer _there. _In a flurry of sudden panic, I've thrown up my arms in front of my fact, almost laughing out when I can see my long fingers near unhealthily pale in the over-heated light. I wiggle them and feel almost grateful when they respond normally. It seems weird to see my arms without my arm guards, remembering the sound of them hitting the dirt as my arms disappeared and…

And…

I'm suddenly very aware of the prickling sensation beneath my back, aware that it doesn't stop at the lip of my trousers but rather continues lower, to my _exposed…_

_My exposed…_

_Where the fuck are my clothes? My weapons?_

I can feel something.

It's a presence nearby, something powerful…something _monumentally _powerful, potent and sure and strong…much stronger than Orochimaru or my brother or…

_Shit!_

The word pulses through my brain like the flash of electricity that runs over my skin as I move, throwing myself up and into a naturally crouched position as I wait for this potential enemy to appear. I'm at a ridiculous disadvantage like this, over-heated, _naked _and completely unable to grasp what's going on. Did the jutsu render me unconscious? Did I simply imagine my fingers and toes disappearing because the jutsu did something to mess with my head? Were Suigetsu, Juugo and Karin defeated and myself captured?

It turns out I'm in the same sort of clearing as the one that Team Hebi occupied right before this _happened _but this is much bigger and full of the sort of plants that I haven't actually seen since before I left the village. On the outskirts of the clearing there are flowering passion fruit bushes winding around silver birches and tomato plants with little green tomatoes hanging from the vine. I stare at the tomatoes like I might stare at a leviathan because it's spring at the moment, the _beginning _of spring no less. Tomatoes don't fruit until high summer and while I admit it's hot enough today…

_How long was I unconscious for?_

The sound of a twig snapping somewhere on my right has me shifting automatically in that direction, the chidori crackling steadily over my skin spiking slightly with my sudden alarm. My eyes spin into sharingan red and my surroundings are suddenly pulled into frighteningly high definition. With my sharingan activated I can see each individual tuft of pollen floating on the air, the way it only ever does in high summer…

"S-Sasuke?"

_Oh god…_

Of all the people to meet here, like this, why did it have to be _him_?

_I can't do this right now Naruto._

_I can't._

Pushing myself closer to the ground, I adjust my fighting style to account for Naruto's natural advantage as the shorter ninja and, before he can break through the trees that I know he'll expose himself from, I launch myself at him, swinging my arms through the air in a taijutsu move designed to immobilise my opponent immediately.

Despite the speed of my move, I'm met with the strong resistance of his arm effectively stopping me. The chidori dying my skin in dangerous electricity jumps across the orange sleeve of his jacket but weirdly, he doesn't even flinch. Instead, a leg sweeps out, longer than I was expecting, to take out my kedged feet and I'm so surprised that my calculations about Naruto's increased height were wrong that he actually manages to take my legs out from under me and I'm in freefall for the second time in 24 hours.

It's while I'm in freefall in a moment that seems to slow down considerably that he finally emerges from the trees and I'm able to get a good look at him.

My eyes widen considerably as I fall until I'm pulling what must be the stupidest face in the world.

Because this is not Naruto…

It's only been a few months since I last met Naruto when he was looking up at me from the decimation of Orochimaru's lair. The Naruto I saw then was still similar to the 12 year old boy I left behind at the Valley of the End. His hair was a little longer, his face was more defined, revealing the beginnings of an angular jaw and his eyes held a note of something that wasn't there before, a depth in the blue that I didn't expect but apart from that, he was essentially the same ninja. This apparition…

He has the same obnoxious blonde hair as Naruto, still an unruly mess atop his head catching tantalising flashes of light as he moves but bits of it are longer than they were a couple of months ago…quite a lot longer. There are two loose, wild bangs framing his face in a hairstyle reminiscent of the 4th Hokage and his face seems to have lost the remainder of its baby fat, the hard, angular lines of his jaw and cheekbones bringing out the exotic shape of his eyes. The whisker marks are still present on his cheeks, one of the only reasons I know that I'm looking at some sort of…weird genjutsu version of Naruto though with the loss of baby fat, they seem to be spaced slightly further apart than I remember.

He's wearing a set of clothes not unlike the attire he was wearing when we last met, a set of garish orange trousers stopping short above his ankles and black, cropped ninja boots with exposed toes. The jacket is a little different, a weird mix of the one he wore as a kid and the one I saw him wearing in the ruin of Orochimaru's lair with a black torso, orange sleeves and a swirling metal shoulder protector adorning a single shoulder with a toggle hanging down over his arm. Weirdly, this jacket has a high and wide collar not unlike the collars of the shirts I used to wear in the Uchiha compound and I can't help but frown at the sense of discomfort this provokes, even as I'm falling. His hitai-ate is still black with a flowing stream of fabric trailing out behind him but the metal plate adorning his forehead has a different symbol on it and though it's scuffed, chipped and scratched beyond repair, it glints in the sunlight in a way that boasts of years of careful polishing.

He's taller than the Naruto I met several months ago, taller than me by a good couple of inches and this along with his facial expression renders me almost senseless as I throw my hands out to stop my freefall, using the momentum of the fall to push myself up into a back flip away from this fight.

The moment I judge myself far enough away, I stare openly at him, trying to figure this out.

He simply straightens out of the uncharacteristically graceful stance he's been standing in and stares right back, his face reflecting a range of emotions that I can't possibly understand in that strange expression.

It's like looking at someone who's been starved of water for a day or so and has just been presented with a jug of the stuff.

The expression is full of so much disbelief, so much yearning and so much…_something else _that my heart actually clenches in my chest for a moment. As I rule, I don't involve myself with the petty emotions of others. I have my own problems to work out, my own emotions that I still, despite years of practice, can't control but…I haven't looked upon such a face since I last looked in a mirror when I was young, not that long after my clan was brutally murdered. It's something you can't ignore if you've experienced it yourself.

"Sasuke…" the name rolls off of his tongue almost reverently and I wince at the open display of affection. The voice is Naruto's but now that I've heard it again, I can tell it's much deeper than the last time we met.

Irritatingly, I actually find it quite pleasant to listen to, completely unlike the shrill, high pitched shriek from the hyper active ninja I remember.

"It's…ah…"

Suddenly, this weird Naruto apparition, this _older _ninja brings his hand up to rub the back of his blonde head making the longer tresses dance in the sunlight and that expression, that completely heart-rendering arrangement of facial features morphs into the grin that I remember from my childhood. It's big and broad, showing his teeth and forcing his eyes shut. In this place, this place caught in the middle of high summer, he truly looks like he belongs.

I will never belong here.

"It's good to see you teme," he says after a while and I take a step back towards the trees as he takes a deliberate step forward.

I make a point of saying nothing and keeping my eyes level with his, watching as his grin falters and his own eyes open to reveal _that_ blue, the blue that I can't forget no matter how much time and bad blood seems to pass between us.

This person standing before me isn't Naruto, at least not the Naruto I met at Orochimaru's hide out…

…but there's no mistaking the colour of his eyes.

"What is this?" I whisper, my voice carrying through the air between us like something cold and hard. Without my noticing, the chidori thrumming across my skin has died off until I'm simply standing like an exposed sack of flesh on the edge of this clearing close to Konoha. Was it this Naruto that did this to me? Did he finally bring me back as he promised he would?

Doesn't he know how close I was to Itachi?

As I watch him, his expression warps once again, showing a brief flash of something like _despair _but before I can really analyse this new expression, his orange clad arm is across his face, wiping roughly at his eyes and then he's fixing me with a calmer smile.

I simply frown in response. It was always a little difficult to keep up with Naruto's more volatile mood swings.

"I brought you some clothes," he says gently, reaching behind him to a pack strapped across his back and pulling out some dark ninja wear which he puts down purposefully slowly on a wide rock not 2 feet from where he was standing. I eye the clothes like they might explode.

"I know it seems weird for me to bring you clothes when you woke up naked in a clearing," Naruto says, putting words to thoughts that hadn't quite fully formed in my own head. "But you're always naked when you time travel and I know how much more _secure _it is if you have something covering your exposed-

But I'm no longer listening to him.

Did he just say…

He couldn't have just said…

Even the dobe isn't that stupid but then…_is _this the dobe? He _does _look a lot older…Haven't I just spent about 10 minutes confirming this? Haven't I compared him to the Naruto I met months ago and found the changes to be incompatible?

_How long was I asleep damnit_?

In a freakish display of conscientiousness, Naruto remains silent as I try to work this out in my mind, carefully monitoring my facial expressions until he obviously sees something that he thinks is heading in the wrong direction.

"You told me you wouldn't believe me before I came out here to meet you so you gave me this," he tells me, taking out another small object and tossing it at me. Considering that this insanity started with a thrown object and a jutsu undetected, I let it drop onto the grass and narrow my eyes at this Naruto-apparition before squatting down and picking up the thing he's thrown at me.

A pocket mirror.

"I look older right?" Naruto mumbles, his words barely audible. "But you still look the same…coz of the time travelling. See for yourself."

He gestures to the mirror and despite myself, I find my eyes travelling downwards and adjusting the angle of the mirror in my palm until I find myself.

And freeze.

There I am.

There I am in my full naked glory, exposed so the cursed seal on my neck is on full display, the tomoe looking like some crude, over-simplified tattoo.

I look exactly like I did the last time I managed to find a mirror in the little town we were in prior to the ambush in the forest. I even have the little cut above my eyebrow from a training accident with Suigetsu and that damn sword of his.

_What the fuck happened to me?_

"H-hey…hey Sasuke it's okay. Calm down."

I make to raise an eyebrow at the idiot still standing in front of me because I'm not panicking but it's only as I lower the mirror to make my less than impressed sentiments known about his over-concern that I realise I'm hyperventilating again. My heart is hammering against my rib cage and in a moment, I've dropped down onto the grass, completely immobile.

"Oh crap, stick your head between your legs and try to breathe normally," Naruto instructs me and I nearly jump out of my skin when I realise that he's sitting right beside me suddenly in a movement so fast that I couldn't even follow it with my activated sharingan. Before I can react and draw myself up properly to try and attack him while he's in close range, his hand is buried firmly in the midnight locks of my hair, pushing my head down until the grass beneath me is inches from my nose.

His arm is strong, applying just the right amount of pressure to be comforting and his skin is just a little too hot, like it always was when we went out on missions and I'd have to save this idiot from his own blunders in Team 7, gripping his hand as he dangled off the edge of a cliff on one memorable occasion.

It takes a while for my breath to regulate, for my heart to finally slow down and my thoughts to arrange themselves into something other than a fucking mess inside my skull. For a moment, I'm simply mortified by how _weak _I appear to be at this moment; naked and gasping for air like some sort of new born _baby. _There's a stirring of that old self loathing and the desperate burning need to be stronger so that I can face my brother confidently somewhere inside but for once I ignore it to focus on the current completely unbelievable set of circumstances.

_Time travel…_

"Here," Naruto's deeper voice says above me and I find myself holding on to the clothes that he brought for me, staring at them vacantly for a moment before dressing on auto-pilot.

"Heh…I bet you feel better right? Now how old are you anyw-

I cut him off from speaking further, unable to take the sound of his much older voice…

…with my fist.

It seems that my bout of auto-pilot has extended into my usual reactions to Naruto and my fist connects with his jaw bone, causing a lurch of horror, excitement and something else inside me when I feel the very real collision of his jaw bone on my knuckles.

His head whips back, the bangs of his hair flying out by his face like yellow blades, and cracks against a tree trunk situated behind him in a way that would render any formidable shinobi unconscious but this is Naruto I'm dealing with. Naruto the stamina monster who can take a hit meant for someone with 3 times his skills and in an instant, he's responded in kind, his own fist ramming into the side of my face, connecting just a fraction above my eye - an insurance that I'll have a black eye to remember this little scuffle by.

As my own head snaps back, I actually find myself smirking, the expression foreign on my face.

Somehow, and I have no idea how to explain _why, _that punch is more proof that this is all real than the mirror, than actually touching this genjutsu-like apparition and actually seeing myself disappear before my own eyes all put together.

Because that punch _is _Naruto.

I really am sitting here in the height of summer in the middle of some random clearing with a Naruto x many years older than me.

I stare at him through wide eyes, his fist still poised near my cheek.

"Teme!" he growls under his breath. "Why the fuck did you do that? I forgot how much of an insufferable asshole you can be when you're out of your Goddamn comfort zone. Sheesh…"

"How old are you?" I ask his question, the sound of my voice shaky but still laced with that hint of prideful arrogance that is just a part of who I am.

He's grumbling profanities at me and massaging his jaw but he pauses to glare at me when I ask the question, his eyes betraying the true emotions playing under the mask of normality he likes to wear when things are a bit much.

"25," he responds waspishly, pausing thoughtfully as I have to suppress the urge to let my jaw drop.

"Uh…well…26 in another 2ish…months."

_25…nearly 10 years…_

And before I can stop myself, I'm examining this Naruto again, my eyes raking his body for the changes to show the passing of 10 years. Back in my time, I have no interest in Naruto's development. He provides no benefit to me or to my quest to conquer Itachi outside of allowing me to achieve the Mangekyou if I should actually succeed in killing him but here…I don't know. It's like I've regressed back to how I used to be, back to when we were in Team 7 and I would occasionally scrutinise Naruto after a long mission because more often than not, he was heinously injured and refused to say anything out of fear of showing weakness.

With the high collared jacket on, even in this heat, I can't really see much but I can tell that he's well toned beneath the slightly baggy set to his clothes. His shoulders fill out the jacket well at the top, only becoming baggy around his midriff where his body obviously tapers inwards. His hands are rough and calloused from years of ninja training and there's a weird, spiralling scar on the palm of one of his hands as he moves to scratch his nose, his irritation at my punch dropping away like water from a leaf tip as he realises I'm watching him so intently.

Once again, for the briefest instance, there's a flash of something not unlike despair in the depths of his eyes but like before, it's quickly glossed over.

_What happened to make you look at me like that?_

"You said I gave you the mirror," I state, unable to tear my eyes away from this Naruto now that I've established just what he is.

Naruto gives me a strange look, like I'm pushing something sensitive, a new myriad of emotions passing over his face in fast motion, all of them hard to look at and powerful, humbling.

_Naruto, what have you been through?_

"You did, you said you wouldn't believe me otherwise and you were kinda right," Naruto tells me. "You said it was hard the first time you time travelled to actually get over yourself and accept that the impossible had happened."

_First time?_

"I time travel more than once?" I ask, ignoring the disconcerting fact that Naruto and I obviously have a lot to talk about in the future.

Naruto's eyes flash a particular kind of blue in the light from the over-hanging sun between the leaves of the trees and I inhale shallowly, absently holding my breath as he looks at me.

"Yeah, you do. You travel a lot from now actually. How old are you? What's actually going on in your life right now? You look…like you used to when everything was a bit shit, y'know?"

I can't help the glare that I direct at him following that declaration, feeling the molten anger rolling off of me in waves enough that he actually flinches, the first time I've been able to rile him since I appeared naked in a clearing in the woods by Konoha. What does he know of how shit everything is? That's my _life_! It's always been one shit occurrence after the other, the decimation of my clan, the marked attention of that snake sannin, taking the scroll with my brother's whereabouts on it and _time travelling _to some distant future…

Everything has been and always will be shit…

…at least until I kill Itachi.

Getting over the initial force of my death glare, Naruto's eyes narrow as he watches me, his expression somewhat pensive and oddly sharp. I can see the flash of intelligence illuminating behind the endless blue of his eyes like the lightning strikes in a thunder storm.

Since when did this idiot grow a brain?

"You're still after Itachi," he tells me in no uncertain terms, his face flashing with triumph as my glare intensifies so much I'm surprised he hasn't spontaneously combusted on the spot.

"So…looking at you…you must be around…15 or 16?" The inflection on the end of that statement makes it a question but honestly speaking, he doesn't require me to answer. He already knows that he's right and my lips thin out in annoyance.

"Ha," Naruto chuckles, his eyes glazing over as he looks into the past. If I wanted to, I could use this opportunity to attack him as I have in the past, aiming to do damage before he can defend himself but strangely, I have a feeling this would end worse for me. Though it's muted, I can feel the potency of his power even while he's simply sitting in a clearing beside me. It's quietly terrifying.

And infuriating.

"I was still looking for you back then and desperate to make you understand everything…turns out I did a better job of convincing you when I didn't have a chance to prepare y'know…heh heh."

I blink at him, mentally memorising this cryptic nonsense for later analysis. For now, let him ramble and give away the future. Perhaps I can make use of it.

Pulling himself back from wherever he's gone, Naruto suddenly breathes in deeply and sighs a strangely wistful sigh that has me frowning at him again. His expression has a flint like edge as he leans back on his hands on the grass, his stormy eyes meeting my own and causing my breath to hitch uselessly in my throat.

It's unnerving how intense his eyes are now.

_Were they always so expressively blue?_

Yes…they were.

"Sasuke," he says my name urgently, the sudden frenzied look on his face coinciding wonderfully with the feeling of nausea flaring up in my gut again. Does he know I feel sick? What does this mean?

"Listen okay? This is really important…not for now but for when you're older and…ah fuck it…"

I stare at him intently, drawn in to his urgency, half pissed off that the authority in his voice has made me pay attention whether I want to or not. How does he do that? It's enraging that he has this kind of effect at all.

_Why?_

When he speaks again, his voice is slightly muffled around the edges and the understanding that I'm probably going back to my time now hits me with such relief that I actually almost pass out just from the feel of that alone.

Naruto's blue eyes are the only thing in perfect focus.

"I'm sorry alright? I'm sorry that it takes me so long to figure everything out. I'm sorry that I still…I'm just sorry…"

His eyes are shimmering around the edges and the colour of his face is changing, a crimson flush streaking across tan cheeks as he gets upset about what he's saying to me. He's sorry? Sorry for what? That he managed to bring me back to the village? Because I suppose I should face that truth head on right now if I'm to believe that I gave Naruto a mirror to convince a past self of my own time travelling…

A single transparent tear spills over the edge of the corner of his eye to leave a trail down the harsh lines of his face.

_Ninjas don't cry Naruto. _

In all surrealism, Naruto's sadness, the sincerity of his words…the way he's looking at me…all of it eats at me and before I can confine my reactions to something rational, I've reached up to brush the stray tear away, gasping when my fingers are once again missing and I meet Naruto's cheek with nothing but air.

Naruto breathes out steadily as the rest of my hand follows my fingers and his breath sends a heated waft over the exposed skin of my arms.

"Sasuke…" he breathes out my name in a way that causes a stirring of something within me that is entirely new, not linked to the black ball of hatred I've come to know and I don't like it.

I really don't.

There's more, I can see there's more he's desperate to say but instead, he bites his lip hard enough to draw blood and leans in so fast I almost miss it.

The kiss is firm and chaste against my chapped lips but…

But…

The feel of his lips on mine. It's not…repulsive…it's not…

I'm finding it hard to keep my thoughts together as the black spots invade but I still manage to pull my remaining hand back into a hasty fist, throwing it out in a reactive display of indignation that he would _dare _do something so familiar, so disgusting, so…

His low chuckle is the last thing I hear before everything once again fades away.

My fist doesn't connect with his jaw again.

* * *

_So ends the first chapter at a whopping 20 pages._

_I hope you enjoyed it._


	2. Time Heals All Wounds

_AN: I was supposed to put this chapter out yesterday but ended up wrapping presents for Christmas instead (is sheepish)_

_A huge shout out to __**Cheezcake-chan **__and __**Devil Dragon Angel **__for favouriting this story. I hope you enjoy the next chapter._

* * *

**2: Time Heals All Wounds**

_Sasuke is 16_

"Hee hee, yep, yer chronology's been properly fucked with make no mistake."

My eye flinches before I can stop it, a quirk in the left corner that probably makes me look more insane than I already feel sitting before this old hag like woman in the middle of a poor market town under the overhanging roof of an abandoned shop asking about the possibility of time travel and how to stop it.

I take a deep breath in and try to hold my reaction to all this in check.

_I was hoping that it wasn't real._

Behind me, Suigetsu and Karin are shuffling nervously, Suigetsu's eyes continuously darting out into the street like he thinks we'll be attacked for being madmen. Neither of them seem to be having trouble believing my time travel theory though this is the first time I've allowed them to be privy to this explanation for my sudden disappearance in the field. They both witnessed me vanishing, dissolving into nothing as I shifted from one time period to the next so as far as they're concerned, I guess anything's possible.

I probably should have gone into details when I woke up back in my own time on the hard, grassless ground with a light film of dew over my naked body but it's hard to figure out how even the most open-minded person will react to being told something completely crazy. I'm not exactly well known for my mental stability amongst my team anyway considering Karin's chakra based insight. She knows how vengeance taints my chakra, she knows that I am nothing more than a twisted shadow of hatred.

_He _made me that way.

So instead of telling them about my meeting with the _older _Naruto, of what went on in that clearing in the height of summer with fan-leaves creating pools of shadow on the lush ground, of that…kiss…I simply asked them to get me to the best, most secretive healer and jutsu specialist they could find.

The old hag stumbling through the ruined shop mumbling to herself in a cracked voice is their answer to that request and though I was dubious at first, since she took a good look at me after hearing about this time travel nonsense and _confirmed _it of all things, I have to say that I'm impressed with their response.

"Don't think I can fix a mess like that without knowing _everything _that's gonna happen in yer life sonny," she says to me, re-appearing in the doorway with a few suspicious bottles in her hand and a twinkle in her cataracts. "Would probably use up all of my chakra to try anyways so you're probably just gonna have to put up with it."

"Put up with what?" I ask her, my voice low and sharp, strange sounding with the hint of hysteria I can't quite mask.

"Time travellin' at random," she informs me in the tone of voice that suggests she's just told me I'm going to have to eat vegetables to stay healthy rather than weather random bouts of time travelling at potentially crucial moments in my life. It will practically kill my usefulness as a shinobi. How will I be able to work with anyone again if they can't trust me to remain in my designated time and provide adequate support.

My face, I know, is impressively impassive but I'm beginning to seriously question the intuitiveness of this hag because she reads my inner turmoil with perfect precision, her own expression softening under the layer of filth caking her face.

"Now there's no need to panic too much, you won't travel all that often and I've got some drugs that might repress it if ye've got something important to do."

I resist the need to scowl at her for being able to get into my head and flush out the achingly raw truth of my…discomfort with this whole situation, instead eyeing her warily as she drops one of the smaller bottles into my hands, a bottle made of thick orange glass that infuriatingly reminds me of Naruto.

I meet the old hag's eyes with my own as she stoops in front of me though I know with cataracts like that, she won't exactly be able to meet my gaze. Weirdly the milky pupils level with mine anyway, her expression serious now.

"This time travel thing…it works a bit like epilepsy alright? The symptoms will be similar so these drugs are the ones I generally give people for epilepsy. Take it sparingly, only when ye really need to and I'll tell ye straight up, they won't always work. If you get emotionally involved enough in what you're doing, ye'll probably have an attack anyway."

The mask on my face falters slightly hearing this.

_If I get emotionally involved enough…_

_What about my fight with Itachi, it's all I've lived for. There's no way I can repress my emotional response to that._

I can't disappear in the middle of that fight. I just can't.

I can't…

"Is there anything else you can do to guarantee I'll stay?" I ask her, my voice almost a whisper through the gloom of the day.

"Anything at all?"

Her pupils quiver slightly and she stands on creaking legs before me, her amusement at my predicament slowly ebbing away as she truly appreciates my despondency over this matter.

This isn't a game for me. I _cannot _disappear when I fight my brother.

But she shakes her head, her matted hair rustling against her moth eaten cloak.

"Nothin' more I can do sonny, guess it's down to you to figure out."

* * *

The rain falls in droves over the destruction of the old Uchiha settlement, the sky is a tumultuous, troubled grey. Surrounding this place is a barrier of black flame, an Amaterasu gone awry that will burn forever. The only thing that remains intact in this place is the wall I am currently propped up against, a wall with a cracked representation of the Uchiha fan, white and red showing up painfully against this grey and black world.

The rain reminds me of something Asuma said at the funeral of the 3rd Hokage.

_The sky is crying too._

My brother lies beneath me on a bed of sunken rubble, a shattered shell of the strong shinobi I've always known. His grey eyes stare vacantly into the grey sky above us, unseeing and I flinch when a drop of rain falls directly into one of his still pupils.

He doesn't blink.

He's dead.

And I didn't disappear…

…though I can feel it pushing against the edge of my mind now. My fingers and toes are tingling, the warning sign.

Do I care now? Does it really matter if I disappear and never return? There was never supposed to be anything after Itachi, nothing left to live for.

No-_one _left to live for.

I know he's out there somewhere. I met his clone on the way here screaming out my name and diving towards me like he actually expected to succeed in simply tackling me into submission. It was strange to see him looking the same as he did the last time I saw him at Orochimaru's hideout when I saw him a couple of weeks ago in that summer clearing looking so much older, so much more…well _more_. I sort of want to speak to him but at the same time, I don't. I've spent so long desperately trying to sever that bond that now my vengeance is completed, I simply want to turn away from everything he could possibly offer me.

_'I was still looking for you back then and desperate to make you understand everything…'_

Maybe I already understand everything I need to Naruto…

Or maybe, just maybe, I don't understand anything at all.

I'm unperturbed when my fingers and toes disappear this time, unbothered when my arm guards fall to the ground and my boots drop out from under me. I feel a brief flicker of irritation at the thought that there won't be anyone to look after my sword but then pass that off as trivial when I remember that there's nothing to be gained from keeping it now. There's no meaning in fighting so hard to get stronger every day.

My brother's face starts to blur in front of me, his facial features slowly un-focussing as I go. I lose the clarity of his eyes first, frowning when I'm unable to lock onto them the way I was able to lock on to the eyes of the older Naruto the first time I travelled. I guess it's just that much more difficult to hold on to the gaze of a corpse.

It's a little different when I go this time though, almost like I'm sighing and the feeling of losing consciousness is a relief. For a moment, just one, tiny, insignificant moment, I really want this to be the end. I want Itachi to have managed to do some serious internal damage so that instead of simply disappearing, I'm dying…

I want to see my mum again, my dad.

I want this to actually be over.

But of course, as always, I don't get what I want at all.

* * *

_Sasuke is 16 and 7_

Konoha.

I know immediately that this is where I am because I've woken up on the dock that I used to frequent in the abandoned Uchiha compound as a kid. I breathe in deep, half relishing and half despairing at the scent of the water that I knew so well and wince at the feeling of random and ravenous hunger clawing at my gut.

A stiff breeze blows across the water and over my naked body causing goose flesh to spring up along my skin and I wonder vaguely when I am, if I could possibly sneak into my own house and find something to wear.

Briefly, I let my senses extend, searching the area for older Naruto but there is no potent chakra to latch on to so I have to assume he's not here. Maybe he didn't know that I was coming this time or maybe he doesn't enter the Uchiha compound like everyone else in this petty village.

"Oi!"

I start when I hear the voice.

Because this is the Uchiha compound, abandoned for so long…

_Naruto?_

Before I can really think about it, I bolt upright until I'm sitting in an undignified cross legged position on the wood of the dock staring out at the water where a fishing boat is floating lazily along.

There is no mask to hide my emotions as I stare at this boat and the people on board, people I haven't seen since Itachi murdered them all…

"Kid, did you get drunk last night? Do you remember anything?" One of the men on the boat calls out, waving cheerily at me, obviously amused at the idea of me getting drunk and turning up naked on the dock in the morning.

I know this man.

He was the baker my mum used to get the rustic bread from, the one that used to put extra sweet buns in my mother's basket until he realised I don't like sweet things and switched to putting a little tomato bread in the bag for me instead.

The last time I saw him, his stomach had been sliced open and his guts had stained his front porch black.

_God…when am I?_

When older Naruto said that I time travelled, it never occurred to me that I could _back _in time as much as I could go _forward. _

Why is this happening to me?

If the baker on the boat is alive then this must be at least before the massacre so I'm over 8 years in the past.

_They _are still alive…

My gaze shifts from the boat to the edges of the dock where I can see various people strolling along the banks, more people I remember from before…There, standing on his own closest to the edge of the bank is father's subordinate chief in the Uchiha police force and there is the lady my mum used to drink tea with on a Sunday morning walking a small, yapping dog. Over that way is a group of boys Itachi used to hang out with before he made ANBU, all of them looking to be about Academy graduating age. One of them, a tawny boy with an overly exaggerated expression of concentration on his face is trying to walk on the water from the edge of the bank, constantly falling in while his companions look on and laugh at him.

If they're about 12 now…then that must mean that I'm about…7 in this time?

_One year…one year until the massacre._

I briefly consider the consequences of warning myself but watching the boys on the bank, the boys at least 5 years older than my younger self in this time, I have to conclude that this would be a stupid idea. There is no way at age 7 that I would be mature enough to handle hearing something like the idea of a massacre. It would seem almost as impossible as the sky falling or something like that.

I stand on shaking legs as the fishing boat comes closer, pulling up beside me on the dock. The baker is looking at me newfound concern, his Uchiha eyes bright. I resist the urge to stare into them because it's surreal to see those eyes on someone other than myself or my wayward brother.

_He's dead._

"Hey…are you alright? You look a little green around the gills kid…Hey, how old are you? Aren't you a little young to be drinking?"

_Itachi's dead._

"You're bleeding too…did you hit your head? Hey dad, do you think you could reach into the storage box and pull out my spare trousers?"

_I killed him._

"Here you go kid. I'm guessing you live somewhere on the Uchiha compound with eyes like that heh. Make sure you wash those before you get them back to me alright? Uchiha's got to look out for one another after all."

_Why am I here?_

"Thank you," I manage by the way of some sort of response, pulling on the trousers and feeling infinitely better for the cover despite the fact that these are a little too long in the legs and just a little too big around the waist. Slowly, I crouch down to roll up the legs of the trousers and as I do, my stomach makes a sound that sends a flash of heat across my cheeks.

"Oh man, you owe me for this big time kid," the baker chuckles, reaching into his back pocket and digging out some coins, holding them above my hand and looking at me seriously.

"Now I'll only give you the money to get something to eat if you promise to get your ass to a hospital as soon as you've eaten. It doesn't look like the wound to your head is too bad but it's always better to check a concussion."

I nod absently and blink when the coins are dropped into my hand, cold and a little damp from where they've been sitting in the baker's pocket while he's been fishing.

Beside him on the boat, the baker's dad snorts at his generosity, eyeing me with distaste and earning a disapproving look from his son.

"Don't make noises like that dad, you never know, this kid could be the next Hokage."

"Not if he keeps fooling around with drink he won't," the old man grouches, averting his eyes to the water, watching a fish floating tantalisingly beneath the water.

"Aw come on dad, you remember what it was like to be young and…"

My attention wanders from the conversation when I spot the grocery shop on the other side of the lake and my stomach lurches painfully, letting out another disconcerting noise. I mumble out another 'thank you' to the baker and his father who ignore me in favour of arguing with each other about the morals of the world and the terrible trouble with teenage drinking and stagger off in the general direction of the store.

It takes me a while to get my feet to work properly, almost like I left a piece of my brain behind…or in the future…and I can't quite process the messages to make my feet do what I want them to do. Along the way, people stop to point at me in my limited attire, bare footed, bare chested with curse mark on show for all to see and a streak of blood across my face from Itachi's last attempt to take my eyes.

Luckily, the grocery store on the Uchiha compound isn't a 'no shirt, no service' establishment. Because so many of the Uchiha are highly adept ninjas, they're used to people running in looking all kinds of hell and needing access to some sort of sustenance as a matter of priority. It doesn't fail to turn heads when someone flies in looking like that but at least it doesn't generally cause a panic. I remember, when I was little, seeing ninjas moving through the store like that with gashes on their arms or faces that didn't need immediate medical attention. When Itachi became a member of ANBU, he was sometimes amongst the ninja that moved through the shop like that and one day, I vowed I would be one of them too.

How ironic it is that I get to fulfil that dream only 3 or 4 years older than Itachi was with Itachi's blood running down my face.

_My life is full of these little bitter ironies. _

"Can we get some tomatoes? We could have them in sandwiches!"

I freeze when I hear the voice, boyishly high and so _happy _that it almost burns through the hatred that I've spent so long nurturing.

I remember…

I remember being that boy…

He's standing a few feet away from me, much shorter than I ever remember being and scrawny, next to the vegetables, peering at the red ripe fruit with an intensity that makes his mother chuckle.

_His mother…_

Oh God…_his mother…my mother…she's there…_

Mum…

"Sandwiches?," she chuckles and her voice is so…I'd actually forgotten the sound of her voice, so clear and soft, a little low for a woman's but full of so much genuine affection…

_It hurts, it hurts to look at her…_

_Why did he hurt her? How could he?_

"I was thinking maybe we could just eat them as they are. They look too good to cut up and put in a sandwich, don't you think?"

The younger version of myself turns slightly, tearing his eyes away from the tomatoes to look at her, my mother, hope shining out plainly for anyone to see and take advantage of.

_Such a stupid, naïve child. So much pain to come…_

She is just as beautiful as I remember. Over the years, I hadn't realised, but I actually forgot what she looked like, only remembering that she was beautiful. Her skin is pale like mine and her hair is dark like mine, shining like black silk under the lights in the shop. She's wearing the long skirt she used to favour, the one that always smelt like wild flowers and her eyes are wonderfully alert, expressive, nothing like my own apathetic face.

I still love her just as much as I did then…how weird is that? You'd think it would fade, would crumple and crinkle with age like old paper and eventually turn to dust but I guess it's a lie what they say about time healing all wounds.

I guess bonds are harder to kill than I originally thought.

It shouldn't come as a surprise when my father walks out from one of the other aisles dressed in his casual home wear because it's obviously a weekend and he doesn't have to work. He still looks far too serious, his black hair showing streaks of grey, his eyes holding some emotion that I mistook for disapproval when I was little. Now that I'm here looking at him like this, I can see that it's something else entirely…something like despair only mixed with a hard confusion. He looks at the younger version of myself like I'm some sort of alien, like he has no idea what to do with me.

I always wanted to make him look at me the way he does Itachi, with outright pride but I never did manage it before he died, even when he acknowledged my efforts with the fireball jutsu, that was only the start of what was to be a long and arduous road to win his pride.

_Are you proud of me now dad?_

I only realise that I've been staring at the little family in front of me when the younger version of myself meets my gaze and hides behind mother's skirt, his expression suddenly fearful. I have the strangest urge to reprimand him for showing his emotions so freely, especially fear but obviously, I can't do that here and I haven't completely lost my wits, despite probably looking like I have.

"Mum…" my younger self whispers.

Our eyes meet, Uchiha black on Uchiha black.

_Mother…_

Her eyebrows flicker as she looks at me, a flash of recognition passing beneath the reflective pools of her eyes but then it's gone and she's simply hugging her young son to her, trying to soothe him with her proximity.

"Excuse me young man but just who do you think you're staring at?" dad asks, stepping in front of mum and giving me a flint-edged look that's almost, but not quite, threatening, a by-product of his job in law enforcement.

I take a deep breath, choking back emotions that feel like they're wringing me thoroughly through and fall back on the eloquence I picked up at home before everything went so God awfully wrong. It's something I thankfully never lost though I spent an inordinate amount of time with Naruto and was in danger of picking up his moronically common habits.

"My apologies sir," I begin, bowing slightly to the senior member of my house hold, wondering how long I might be allowed to hold his gaze before it's considered rude. "I sustained a head injury in my training this afternoon and my concentration isn't the best at the moment. I…it's just that I've been meaning to join law enforcement following this month's jounin exams and have been trying to arrange a meeting with you without success. To see you so casually out in the shops…"

I trail off and let my eyes slide over to my mother once more who has relaxed considerably after hearing my story. It makes me wonder why she's so wary. Perhaps she was always like that and I just never noticed because I was too young?

"Ah, I see," my father says above me, meeting my eyes as I rise into a standing position once more. His dark eyes skim the blood running down my face and my loose trousers, clearly unimpressed by my attire.

"I'm Uchiha…"

_Sasuke. I can't tell them my real name. Mum's already a little suspicious, what the fuck name do I give them? _

"Naruto, Uchiha Naruto."

…_Damnit._

"You'll have to forgive my manner of dress…my trousers were ruined in training…" I say, shifting uncomfortably beneath my father's scrutiny. No matter how old I get or how powerful, father's eyes still manage to unnerve me this much. Will that ever change? I could probably take him out with a few easily executed moves and yet the man still intimidates me like no-one else ever has or ever will.

"Please, don't worry about it. It's nice to meet you Naruto, It's good to see some young people still interested in the less glamorous side of shinobi work. I'm afraid that my sons won't be able to appreciate the important sort of work that I do what with them both aspiring to join ANBU."

I let my eyes flick back to my younger self who has extracted himself from behind mum and is looking at me with the sort of suspicious intelligence I actually feel a little smug about. As if on cue, Itachi meanders out from his position in the next aisle carrying a packet of rice flour that he carefully puts into mother's basket before glancing up in my direction.

_Your blood on my face…_

_'They're my eyes…my eyes…'_

"I'm…sure they'll make fine shinobi sir," I manage, feeling a stirring of the hatred within me as I look at this boy, this boy who is my brother who is probably already planning out how to massacre the Uchiha…

Fine shinobi…

"Oh…yes," dad says, turning slightly so I have a better view of mum and the two boys. "These are my sons, the older Itachi and the younger Sasuke and this is my wife Mikoto."

I look to the younger Sasuke who has turned his attention to his brother. He has a weird expression on his face that I identify immediately as a mixture of adoration, envy and a little hatred.

Well, Itachi did say that that tiny sliver of hatred was the reason he allowed me to live.

_Foolish older brother._

"It's a pleasure," I say, allowing my eyes to feed up to mum who is looking quite friendly now she knows I'm not actually a threat, even in the state I'm in.

"Well look Naruto, why don't I see about getting you an interview sometime next week. That way, your file will be on record when you pass the jounin exams and we can induct you into our law enforcement ranks quicker."

My eyes stay on my mother as dad tells me this and I wince only slightly when he calls me 'Naruto' again. Of all the stupid names to pop into my head…

I'm going, I can feel it in the way my fingers and toes are starting to tingle, in the way the pinching feeling of hunger in my gut is twisting into what is becoming familiar nausea and for now, I just want to remember what she looks like.

"That's sounds perfect sir," I confirm, my speech starting to slur slightly with the effort of trying to stay just a moment or two longer. I have a feeling like an instinct that disappearing in the middle of a grocery store like this would be an incredibly bad idea and I have the desperate urge to walk outside into the adjoining alley so I can disappear in peace.

"Sorry, I hafta go," I manage. "Head injury needs to be seen to after all."

Mum nods at me sympathetically, her eyes full of concern and I wonder if, through this random time travelling malarkey, I'll be able to see her again.

_I hope so._

It's so wrong to hope for something like that.

_I just miss her…_

I should just let the dead be…

_But if I can see her again then maybe there is something to life after Itachi…_

I back out of the shop in an awkward fashion, keeping my eyes on mum until the door closes in front of me, obscuring the family from view. As soon as they're out of my sight, I turn and briskly make my way to the aforementioned alleyway where I projectile vomit bile onto the wall opposite me and disappear with a rush of vertigo.

* * *

_Sasuke is 16_

Days pass as they always have and always will.

I am aware of this time passing only because the light in my room at the inn we're staying at changes. Every time the light is a fiery orange, seeping through the cracks in my curtains to play on my eyelids, I mark off another day on the calendar I've scratched out on the wall beside my bed.

I don't know why I've started doing this. There's no point in keeping a record of time when I'm not waiting for anything.

It's been nearly 2 weeks since I managed to kill Itachi and I haven't time travelled again. Occasionally, because I've been in bed pretty much constantly since that fateful battle, I get the feeling of pins in needles in some part of my body and hope against hope that I'll get to visit my family again but it never happens and after a while, I give up hoping.

Karin and Juugo have taken it upon themselves to nurse me back to health bringing me sustenance that I generally ignore until I get so hungry I can't think about anything but the cramping of my stomach. Just as before, they were waiting for me when I returned from my trip to the past, telling me about some weird masked guy that came prowling around as soon as I disappeared searching for something, probably me. I'm not exactly bounty-less in this part of country or anywhere now, for that matter.

It's only now that Itachi's dead that I'm starting to feel the negative effects of my actions in pursuit of revenge.

Have I thought about going back to Konoha?

Yes…

Naruto, I know, would accept me back without question and that is almost reason enough to go back by itself but the rest of them…

It can't be what it was and I guess I don't want that.

I don't want ties that will make me start to feel again…

I don't know if I could survive the pain of losing someone again and in avoiding that…

…I can't go back.

There's a knock on my door that drags me out of my thoughts and has my head turning lethargically in that direction. I grunt out some sort of permission to enter and Karin wanders in with a trey of rice broth that tells me it must be near dinner time.

"Hey Sasuke, how are you feeling?" she asks me as she places the trey down on the little table beside my bed and sits cross-legged in front of it, waiting for me to get up and start eating.

I would scowl at her if I had the energy but honestly, I just don't care enough to process anything other than apathy at the moment so instead I fix her with a blank look that makes her recoil far more than my death glares ever did.

"…Team Hebi has no further purpose, you and the others are free to pursue your own goals," I tell her through a parched throat, something I've been telling them since they dragged me to this place to recover.

I have no ties with them beyond the mission to destroy my brother. Why can't they see that this is over now? That everything's over now? I am not planning on doing anything else. I may simply wait in this room now to die so they should move on with their own lives and forget this as nothing more than a detour on their respective paths.

Karin's eyes meet mine over the top of her thick rimmed glasses and I simply meet her gaze with blank eyes.

She sighs animatedly and leans on the desk, her elbows sharp on the wood.

"Sasuke…I know you're…a little at a loss now that your brother's actually…"

There is a jolt of something murderous inside me at the mention of what happened between me and my brother and for a moment, I see the echo of true fear in her expression confirming that my face must have changed for the first time in days, just for an instant.

It's none of her business how I choose to live my life now.

_Go away._

She stares at me for a good long while and I simply return her stare until she sees fit to blink. She doesn't get up to leave like I want her to but she isn't as comfortable as she was.

"H-have you thought that maybe…now that you've gotten your revenge…you're actually free to live your life how you want? You could…could quit being a shinobi if you wanted and settle down somewhere…you could live a peaceful life."

_A peaceful life…_

Is there truly such a thing for an Uchiha?

Aside from the multiple bounties I have on my head making it virtually impossible to set up a home anywhere, I am also the last of a clan that carries the sharingan and am thus going to be a target for shinobi for many years to come.

_A peaceful life._

What a joke.

"Get out," I spit at her venomously, shifting on the bed so I'm facing the wall where my scratched out calendar glares at me.

_2 and a bit weeks since Itachi died._

"But Sasuke I-

"GET OUT!"

It's the first time I've ever raised my voice outside of battle. It's the first time I've felt the coil of fury directed at someone other than my brother. Without him, other people have suddenly become significant, meriting my anger whereas before they would only ever provoke a disdainful response.

Does that mean I've become vulnerable to the potential effects that people can have on me simply because I no longer have Itachi to occupy my thoughts, my time?

_God…it's sickening._

I can feel Karin's eyes boring into my back but ignore her on the grounds that if I try to speak again, I might just launch a kunai along with my words to lodge in her throat.

Would killing her rid me of the weakness of reacting to other people?

No…

I don't think so.

I feel a sense of lacklustre relief when I hear her pivot on the creaking floorboards of my room, walking swiftly across the room, pulling the door to and leaving without another word.

The whole room seems darker, more empty when she leaves but I embrace the darkness gratefully. Emptiness I understand, emptiness is all I ever deserve, emptiness provides the only comfortable space now.

I close my eyes and focus on my breathing, half meditating and half simply allowing my thoughts to fall away from me like water.

When I finally succeed in getting my mind to go blissfully blank, I see a flash in the darkness of brilliant blue and cringe inwardly when I find myself mentally replaying the kiss that the older Naruto gave me in the clearing when I disappeared the first time, his eyes intently fixed on mine, seeing me and only me…

His lips were hot on mine but not unpleasant…not unpleasant…

_What does it mean?_

* * *

_Sasuke is 16, Naruto is 14_

This time, when I go, I simply move through time whilst I'm sleeping, completely unaware that I've travelled until I wake up in a rice field with my feet submerged in an irrigation channel. There is a chilly bite to the air and as I sit up I can see that the rice for this year has already been harvested. The sparse trees dotting the edge of the fields are covered with leaves in an inspiring range of reds to gold so I'm guessing it's around mid-Autumn.

For a few moments, I simply sit, getting my bearings and allowing the last of the familiar nausea to disperse before standing up and trekking to the farm house on the edge of the rice fields to steal some clothes. I'm in luck when I turn on my sharingan to discover that there's nobody home and I'm able to break in without incident, creeping through the house to the first bedroom I can find and picking out the darkest clothes shoved unceremoniously to the back of the closet behind some rather garish T-shirts.

Once I'm suitably clothed though the clothes are once again a little baggy, I make my way into the nearest town, wandering along what appears to be the main dirt path, noting the tea bushes dotted along the side of the road that provokes me to draw the conclusion than I am in fact somewhere within the Tea country.

What I'm doing here I don't know but there seems to be as much consistency between the places I visit as there is between the time periods I visit. No use searching for meaning where there obviously isn't any.

I'm thinking that I might stop into one of the main shops along the high streets in town for a cup of the best bitter green tea I can find when a huge explosion of chakra blasts out on my right, sending a shock wave of power across the road, hitting me squarely in the stomach. The force of the shock wave re-kindles the nausea which had died off nicely following my impromptu trip here and I have to double over the path and retch uselessly for a couple of minutes before straightening again and gawping at the free-flowing chakra creeping across the foliage of the surrounding area.

_Red chakra, just like…_

I don't really give myself time to think about what I'm doing, taking off in a sprint directly towards the diabolical flow of chakra I can still feel pulsing steadily at the back of my eyes.

_I know this chakra. He used it that time at the Valley of the End…_

The leaves of the tea bushes whip past me as I surge forward, some of them burning in the heat given off by that hellish chakra and letting off a range of enticing smells. Even with the aroma of a thousand different tea bushes sweetening the air, I'm still able to smell the half masked metallic twang of blood and slow to a stop in an area surrounded by rocky mounds, my eyes narrowing as I search for a chakra source somewhat overwhelmed but still markedly different from that of the Kyuubi's.

I find him moments later, the white haired man that saved me from Itachi all those years ago when I foolishly tried to challenge my brother in hopes of getting revenge and saving Naruto from inevitable destruction at the same time.

He looks much the same as he did the last time I saw him save for the jagged hole in his chest pumping out streams of thick blood. In an instant, I'm by his side, not particularly caring one way or another if this man dies right now having never had much of an association with him but Naruto will care and for some reason…

For some reason, that matters.

"Ugh," he groans out, coughing up a thick ream of blood to join the fluid already creeping down his sides from the hole in his chest.

It's a pretty awful injury.

If I was any less of a ninja, I might have been immobilised by the sheer sight of it but luckily for him, I've seen injuries this bad before.

Immediately, I get to work on staunching the blood flow and wrapping a pressured bandage around his midriff. His breath rattles a little worryingly in his chest as he breathes but as soon as he's patched up, I turn my attention to the feel of the red chakra which is becoming more and more malicious with every passing minute.

It's the most awful thing in the world, that chakra.

Filled with more hate than I could ever hope to process, making the black ball I've managed to nurture look like something totally insignificant, like putting a marble next to a bowling ball.

True malevolence.

_Naruto is in the middle of that._

"U…Uchiha…Sa…suke…"

I glance back at the injured man resting up now against one of the rocks with his dark eyes open and on me though glassy and un-focussed. Insanely, I wonder what sort of time period this is - where am I right now? Am I still Naruto's comrade at this point? Will he trust me to take care of that idiot?

Am I _going _to take care of that idiot?

Why am I here? Why did I run towards that vile chakra rather than running away?

_Am I still so caught up in him?_

"Na…Naru…to…" he gasps out, his energy depleting with every syllable he tries to force out. I've bandaged him up as best I can but he still needs to be seen by a healer if he's going to survive this. Do I have time to find one?

No…

The half corpse before me takes a deep breath and hoists himself up against the rock to make his breathing a little easier. His sheet white face turns a terrifying shade of grey for a couple of seconds before settling back to white.

He shouldn't be moving.

"Sasuke…" he repeats, the word coming out easier and I can't help but listen to him. He has the sort of authoritative air that the 3rd Hokage used to have when I was a kid.

"Naruto…is struggling…with the Kyuubi…right now…and has…unleashed…4 tails but…has lost himself in…the process."

My eyes widen before I can think to stop myself from responding.

_Fuck._

4 tails…

What exactly does that mean, how connected is Naruto to the power of the Kyuubi? How long has Naruto been consciously tapping into its power?

As if reading my thoughts, the white haired man leans forward and presses a piece of paper into my slackened hand. His own hands are cold and clammy on mine and make me shiver with involuntary discomfort.

"It's a seal…" he tells me, his breaths starting to become more laboured as he speaks. He sinks back down against the rock until he's almost in the position I found him in, a low gurgling noise moving through the back of his throat as he tries to tell me more. In the end though, all he's able to get out is a bubbling 'save him' before he devolves into nothing more than unintelligible gasping.

I have no idea how to react to this.

No idea at all.

I have no idea if I want to save Naruto or if I want to let the Kyuubi destroy him and the rest of this awful shinobi world.

_I have nothing to live for beyond Itachi…I should just let this world fall to ruin._

It's literally on the edge of my thoughts, the decision to drop everything and simply walk away, to change the world by letting it fall to the Kyuubi's rampage but weirdly, it's the voice of older Naruto that stops me from abandoning life altogether.

_'I forgot how much of an insufferable asshole you can be when you're out of your Goddamn comfort zone.'_

And that is exactly what I am.

An insufferable asshole.

Since when did I want anyone else to suffer for what is essentially my business? When did I start wanting to experience the pain of others just so I'd have someone to relate to? None of them would ever be able to relate to me no matter how much pain they're in.

And Naruto…

_He doesn't deserve to get swallowed up like this._

Many things he does deserve, a swift punch to the jaw, maybe a knife wound to get him to stop fucking _following _me everywhere, a kick to the groin for that kiss and maybe even to die like I intended originally at the Valley of the End…but this?

I'm up and darting away from the fallen figure of Naruto's mentor before I can think on the matter any further, dodging the red tendrils of chakra with expert grace and launching myself through a small wooded area, using the trees as leverage to continue to avoid the chakra weaving through the trees. As I get closer to Naruto, the chakra starts to change into something more solid, something…almost other-worldly, like limbs made of fleshy, static energy.

The chakra crackles as the grass and foliage beneath it melts and I find myself looking into a mass of constantly moving strings, red and black energy writhing angrily together to make up these more solid limbs.

It really is monstrous, frightening beyond anything I've ever experienced before, beyond imagination…

Then I break through the trees and see the source of all this madness.

It's enough to inspire nightmares for the rest of my life.

* * *

_I hope you enjoyed this chapter guys! Leave a review or PM me if you want to ask any questions._


	3. Life is a One Time Offer

_AN: Apologies for the amount of time it's taken me to get this out but I'm in the middle of trying to buy a house at the moment and if you've ever gone through it, you'll know the procedure is a time-stealing bitch. That said, I've checked this chapter for mistakes and I'm pretty sure there are some serious punctuation errors here but I'm too lazy and stressed to try and sort them out. If you spot any, I'm sorry._

_A shout out to __**Sneaky-Ninja-Muffin **__for leaving the first review on this story. You rock and this chapter is totally dedicated to you! A thank you as well to everyone that read and hit the favourite button. You won't be sorry, I promise._

* * *

**3: Life is a One Time Offer**

It's crouched in the middle of a chakra-made crater, its feet widely spaced and it's back arched upwards in the sort of convex way that's almost unnatural.

It's made from that same black and red tangle of string-like chakra moving swiftly through the trees and in a humanoid form, that chakra is sick, wrong, the physical embodiment of madness…

Its face is shadowed in darkness save for two huge glowing white eyes and a jagged, glowing rip of sharp teeth where a mouth should be. There is no recognisable expression on its face, no semblance of rationality. It simply sways where it sits in the crater, bright eyes wide and devoid of anything resembling cognitive thought.

Behind it, waving lazily on the air, is a set of 4 huge fox-like tails.

The atmosphere around it sizzles causing huge distorting heat waves to rise up into the sky and provoke the weather to change for the worse.

It is a true monster.

The last time I saw Naruto, there was a brief moment where, through the power of the sharingan, I was able to connect to the inner reaches of Naruto's mind and meet the Kyuubi sealed inside him. The chakra of the beast was as gruesomely malevolent as the chakra the monster in the clearing is currently creating but when faced with the true essence of the Kyuubi, I was unafraid.

Why?

Because the Kyuubi, while essentially a demon, was coherent. The Kyuubi was rational, able to hold a conversation and _trapped__**, **_it's chakra flow stunted by the bars of the 4th Hokage's seal.

This thing has no such restrictions.

And it has no reason.

As I squint against the disquieting feeling of heat bubbling across my skin, I can almost see the shape of Naruto within that creature, smaller this time than he was at Orochimaru's hideout.

_So young and lost to the hatred of a beast that has been nurturing darkness for centuries._

_Why?_

The hand gripping the seal that Naruto's mentor gave me tightens to the point of pain as I work on forming a plan to approach this creature. The old ninja didn't exactly give me an instruction manual for this seal but I'm guessing it works a bit like an exploding tag and I'll have to place it somewhere on the body before making the seal for release to set it off.

I take in a cleansing breath, one designed to help me clear my head of doubts, and blanch as I exhale and one of the beast's elongated, chakra-infused ears twitches in my direction. It's head turns slightly, cocking to the side, listening and I remain as still as possible, caught up in the true impossibility of this situation.

If the blasted thing can hear when I breathe a little louder from _that far away_ then how the hell am I supposed to get close enough to place the seal?

Will I have to abandon stealth tactics and sanity to fight it?

Perhaps I should use this as an excuse to try out the ability I gained with the Mangekyou I developed after killing Itachi…

I have no chance to form a better plan.

There's a displacement in the air that I'm only able to detect with my sharingan and in literally less than a second that beast is in front of me, swinging a heavily clawed hand down, aiming to rip my torso in half. I dodge only because I'm half way to activating the Mangekyou but the heat follows that thing's swipe and hits me with enough force to be considered an attack in its own right. I wince against the feeling of my skin burning as I'm thrown across the decimated landscape but still manage to right myself in the air, landing on the edge of the crater, my feet scuffing up dust as I come to a stop.

My eyes automatically find the creature as it hurtles back towards me in some sort of freakish slingshot manoeuvre and , randomly, inexplicable pain explodes along the left side of my face. I shriek, throw my hand up to my face to cover my left eye on autopilot and drop into a roll out of the way as the beast collides with the side of the crater sending up a spray of dirt, rocks and sparse foliage.

The debris hits me in the back and the sides as I continue rolling but I can hardly feel the impacts next to the excruciating burn in my left eye. As I finally come to a natural stop on the hard ground, I hunch into the foetal position and simply shudder through the agony, waiting for it to subside so I can continue fighting through this nightmare or waiting for this Naruto/Kyuubi hybrid to finish me…

Time passes like the slow, methodical beat of a dying heart as I wait for the end. Synapses fire off in my head like exploding fireworks, the way they only ever seem to do when I think there's a real possibility that I could die in a given situation and I wonder, in a sudden burst of clarity, if Itachi didn't do something to fuck up my developing Mangekyou as he died which would account for this pain.

_One last way to screw me over._

Eventually, the agony starts to ebb and with a jolt, I realise that the creature hasn't attacked again. Carefully, making sure my movements are slow the way I have done in the past with feral creatures, I pull myself up into a cross-legged position on the dust, staring with open awe at the sight that greets me.

The creature is still situated in the middle of the significantly larger crater looking smaller than it did when I first arrived, writhing on the floor, it's muscles tensing and un-tensing in what looks like some kind of epic seizure. It's bright eyes are wide, horribly surprised and it's letting out a string of high pitched shrieks that set my teeth on edge, some of them eroding away into weird half growled out whimpers.

For a split second, before my mind has caught up with my eyes, I think that maybe it might have done damage to itself with that last attack but then something seems to snap into place at the back of my brain and I can see the fire.

Black fire.

Itachi's Amaterasu.

The fire that burns forever until it's victim has been completely consumed.

It's all over the black and red strings of chakra coating Naruto's body.

_God…oh God…_

The sounds the monster is making are becoming more and more pitiful but the coils of red chakra still leaking into the forest like deadly tendrils aren't receding. I still need to place the seal the old man gave me onto his body, incapacitating him like this isn't enough.

I climb gruellingly onto unsteady feet and take off in an awkward sprint towards the creature, half formed, hysterical thoughts about what could happen to Naruto if I should suppress the Kyuubi's power while he's still covered in the flames of Amaterasu throwing themselves against the cage of my mind.

_I can't think about what could happen…I met Naruto in the future…he survives this…he has to._

…But how much of the future is set?

The heat intensifies as I draw closer to the beast still arching up in an unnatural way in the crater, his clawed fingers digging in to the hard ground so much that blood is actually leaking through the cloak of chakra, mingling with the dusty granules of sedimentary earth. By the time I've started to slide down into the crater with this thing, the air has become so scorching that it seems to be eating the oxygen around us, making me start gasping out like an asthma sufferer. The exposed skin that wasn't already burnt starts to blister until I feel tight practically all over.

I get as close as I can possibly stand before I manage to see something that almost derails my focus. Where the black flames have actually managed to rip through the chakra, I can see patches of heinously burnt skin, twisted human flesh and tiny fragments of bright orange fabric that confirms Naruto really is in there somewhere.

At some point in facing off against this monster, I seem to have forgotten somehow that this is essentially Naruto I'm dealing with here.

This revelation costs me too much precious time though. The monster seems to have found some awareness through the continuing agony provoked by the Amaterasu, it's eyes locking on mine - infinite pools of desolate blank - and we move at the same time.

My hand thrusts forward, slapping the now thoroughly crumpled, ripped and sweaty seal on the forehead of the beast before pulling back to create the sign for release while the creature's claws slash harshly through my right shoulder.

A crippling, stinging sensation explodes across the right side of my body and I let out an ear-piercing screech, falling as far away from the monster as I can and scrambling further until my back hits the side of the crater. My thoughts devolve into mindless streams of processing wave upon wave of pain until my breaths come unevenly sharp and I'm forced to call upon all my ninja training to maintain focus and consciousness, purposefully breathing deeply. Shakily, I reach up with my good hand and support my now lax right arm, hissing through my teeth when my fingers brush against blackened skin and it feels like a thousand miniscule molten hot pokers have been rammed into my shoulder, slowly corroding my skin, my muscles and even the bones beneath.

It's like being the victim of a potent acid attack…

_This is what it feels like to take true damage from the Kyuubi's chakra?_

The injuries I suffered at the Valley of the End, the crippled muscle in the same shoulder and internal bleeding…

_Child's play._

Somewhere, through the fog that's settled over my brain accompanying this new source of excruciation, I manage to turn my attention to the monster and despite the fact that I can still feel my skin slowly peeling away, eaten like wood beneath embers, it's like there's nothing else in the world but that thing.

It's on its knees, huffing out breaths of fetid air and staring at the sky in a way that's almost mournful. As I watch, the seal starts to work its magic and the insane scrabble of black and red chakra starts to recede, from Naruto's face first revealing a myriad of sick looking wounds, a patchwork of angry red gore, blackened fusions of fabric and flesh and, dotted around like anomalies, islands of tan skin somehow untouched by the boiling chakra of the fox. Thankfully, the seal seems to be repressing the flames of the Amaterasu as much as it is repressing the Kyuubi's chakra and if this had been any other circumstance, I might have marvelled at the work of someone very talented indeed.

As Naruto's cheeks are revealed along with a few tufts of matted blonde hair, I notice that the whisker marks are still prominently in place though he's obviously missing a few layers of skin.

The scars run deep….

His teeth are grit and his eyes are closed. His hitae-ate, still the blue one he used to wear in his genin days, has been destroyed and is hanging limply around his neck along with the 1st Hokage's necklace. The claws on his hands and feet fade and then the disgusting chakra starts to pull inwards revealing more damaged skin and the pathetic remains of Naruto's attire, a few shreds of his trademark orange jacket slowly merging with the crisp edges of his injuries, a few strings of frayed mesh holding together along his narrow chest, the barest remnant of his trousers and boxers and blackened ninja boots holding their shape on his feet but barely.

He makes sounds as the chakra recedes, sounds that cut into me for reasons I can't really elaborate on. They start off animalistic, unnerving but as the beast slowly becomes the boy, he's simply a child making involuntary sounds of pain, grunts and whimpers that make me want to try and touch him…

When the last of the chakra finally disperses on the air with a rush of heated steam, he crumples in on himself, curling around his chest and falling sideways. There's a twitch in my system like a muscle memory, something long forgotten and for a moment, I almost remember the incident on the half finished bridge to the Wave country all those years ago when my body moved before I could think to protect the person that was becoming my best friend.

I purposefully don't move to catch him.

_Because that would be too much…admitting too much before I'm ready…_

He hits the ground with a dull thud and starts rasping for breath, his muscles tense with pain.

Honestly, I had no idea that the fox could hurt him like this. I'd assumed that when Naruto used its chakra, it simply protected him like armour and provided him with a rush of power akin to a 'natural high'. It simply never occurred to me that he could be making some sort of sacrifice tapping into that power.

_**Stupid boy.**_

It takes me a millisecond or so to process the fact that Naruto has opened his eyes and is locking on mine with an intensely focussed gaze, his expression far too serious and far too calm.

His eyes are a perfect bloody red…

…and I still have the sharingan activated.

* * *

_I'm facing his cage._

_The bars of his prison tower above me, easily thicker than my torso and made of some sort of reinforced metal. With my sharingan I'm able to see the true masterpiece of the seal that keeps the Kyuubi housed within Naruto's wracked system, the tightly woven systems of chakra that have been created to contain his ominous red power. Within Naruto's mindscape, it simply looks like a paper seal has been placed over the lock of the cage._

_There is a flickering light hanging above me, though I can't tell where the source of the light is coming from and the floor is covered with enough cold water to fully submerge my feet up to the ankles._

_I wonder what the significance of the water is._

_The light dims out as it gets closer to the cage until the inner sanctuary of the cage itself is plunged into pitch black. _

_He prowls behind the bars, his feet causing ripples to spread across the water._

_His red eyes pierce the darkness when he looks at me and he grins, showing sharp yellow canines._

_Naruto is propped up against the bars of his cage, his small body slumped and fully clothed in his own mindscape, the jacket just about to become a little too small for his developing frame. His eyes are open but devoid of life, dull blue staring unaware at the reflection of himself in the water. His lips are parted slightly and his chest rises and falls slowly as he breathes._

_It's reassuring to see that he's still there._

_**As if I would let anyone take my power without tasting the true essence of my hatred.**_

_The Kyuubi's voice resonates through the halls of Naruto's mind making the foundations shake and causing more of a stir to the water. In front of the cage, Naruto flinches slightly._

_**You think he's strong enough to simply take my power without my permission?**_

_"Yes," I answer, an automatic response to what is obviously a rhetorical question and my own verbalisation surprises me slightly. My voice is sure, firm and maybe a little arrogant._

_I really believe this._

_Since when?_

_The fox pauses mid-monologue and scrutinises me, his red eyes narrowing into suspicious slits behind the bars. I hold my ground and stare right back at him, refusing to be intimidated by the Kyuubi at this point, though I can still feel the slash marks of the injury he gave me thrumming across my skin in the real world._

_Eventually, the grin of the fox seems to widen into something more malevolent and he chuckles fiendishly, the sound rumbling through the ground like an earthquake._

_**Interesting…Tell me boy, do you believe so wholeheartedly in this kit's power because you love him or is it really just true, blind belief in the apparently endless potential of an idiot?**_

_My heart hitches in my chest._

_My eyes widen until I'm almost sure they're going to pop clean out of their sockets._

_Love him?_

Love _him?_

_My eyes flit down to the lifeless form of the blonde idiot still lying lax against the bars of the Kyuubi's cage._

_Who the hell could _love _that over-bearing moron?_

_To my chagrin, the fox lets out another cruel laugh, clearly endlessly entertained by the thought of me having those kinds of feelings for the bane of my existence. _

_He's deluding himself if he thinks _that _particular accusation is true._

_What I feel for Naruto teeters on the edge of true, hate filled rivalry and true, solid friendship. That, despite my constant efforts to deny even that much, is how it has always been and how it will always be if I have anything to say about it._

_It's the best I can hope for seeing as severing all bonds has failed time and time again._

_**Very interesting. Mark my words boy, this kit will be the death of you but not in the way that you'd like to think.**_

_Suddenly the Kyuubi has precognitive abilities._

_I've had enough of this charade._

_"You will not take him over like that again," I say and my voice resounds through the halls of Naruto's mind with as much power as the Kyuubi's, authoritative and final._

_I sound like my father._

_**Oh? And who are you to give me such commands, to think that you have the right to speak to the 'demon fox' in such a way?**_

_I open my mouth to respond proudly with my name but just as the first syllable is forming on my tongue, I falter. In the heat of the moment, some weird synapse fires at the back of my brain and I remember…_

_I remember facing off against Naruto at the Valley of the End, my hand plunging through the flesh of his chest, through the muscles, the organs and the bone like it was all made of paper Mache. I remember the way he gripped my arm, his hand carefully exuding enough pressure to make me realise that he was really intending to crush the limb. When I dropped him and staggered back, he met my eyes with the eyes of the Kyuubi, the first time I had seen those blood red slits in place of the usual virulent blue. The power he was suddenly emitting rammed into me and it was all I could do to steady myself on the surface of the water._

_'What are you?' I asked him and he responded with what I tell the Kyuubi now._

_"I'm his friend."_

_My eyes are starting to burn as I reach the end of my limit and something hot and sticky trickles down my cheek from the tear duct in my left eye. I have just enough time to see the gleeful, malicious expression on the face of the Kyuubi falter, his eyes flashing dangerously within the confines of the cage before Naruto's mindscape fades completely._

* * *

I can feel the telltale tingle in my fingers and toes when I regain my composure in the real world and I know I'm about to return to my own time. Blood slips over my cheek from my left eye creating a disturbing mess on my face but I don't deactivate my sharingan just yet because I'm watching as the crimson colouring in Naruto's irises slowly fades to the bright blue I know so well, his slit-like pupils contracting and then growing rounded.

He stares at me, blinking rapidly to try and keep himself awake. It's a losing battle but in true Naruto fashion, he fights valiantly, shifting his hands away from his curled up form to try and push himself up.

"Don't move idiot, you're wounded," I snap at him, my temper worn thin after everything that's happened here.

I'm just tired, not worried.

Certainly not worried…

Naruto freezes with palms flat on the scorched ground, his eyes suddenly becoming impossibly wide. His cracked lips part but there is no inhale or exhale of air and the little skin that's left untouched on his face drains of any colour it may have retained.

The effect that my presence has on this boy makes something _move _inside me.

It's…actually a bit humbling.

_Just how badly did I hurt him when I left him at the Valley of the End? Was our bond ever that strong?_

"S…Sasuke?"

His voice is barely more than a reverent whisper and I want to respond with a taunt, a reprimand, a barked out demand for him to 'shut up' but instead, as I open my mouth, I'm only able to take an involuntary breath of air before the world spins out of focus, his matted hair and red skin merging into some twisted kaleidoscope of colour and I'm back in the room at the inn we've been staying in following my brother's death.

Immediately, I throw up on the dark wood of the floorboards and the sound of my violent heaving draws in Karin who gasps when she sees the state I'm in, babbling incoherently as she thrusts her arm under my nose to bite.

I have the prickling feeling of panic in my gut because Naruto is now completely alone in that crater in the middle of nowhere with nothing but a pile of discarded clothes to keep him company and it takes a good 10 minutes for me to calm down and remember that Naruto is older now, elsewhere doing something completely different, probably eating bowl upon bowl of ramen at this time of night.

It takes Karin nearly 2 hours of medical attention before the injury on my shoulder even clots and then she has to rest for the remainder of the night because she used up way too much chakra trying to fight the poison of the Kyuubi.

I'm left staring into the darkness of the room, pondering with newfound consternation the words the fox said to me in the depth of Naruto's mind.

'_** do you believe so wholeheartedly in this kit's power because you love him?**__'_

I do not love him.

The notion is beyond ridiculous.

He's an idiot of the most retarded kind.

But…

Why then was I so determined to make sure the Kyuubi would not try to consume him again?

_Why did Naruto's fate even matter to me?_

* * *

_Sasuke is 16_

"S-Sasuke, you're up!"

The surprise in Karin's voice is enough to get my back up immediately upon exiting the bedroom that has been my hiding place since Itachi died and I really have to fight to keep the apathetic mask I've been carefully constructing to keep up authoritative appearances in place.

Did she honestly think that I would wallow forever?

I'm stronger than that.

"There's someone strange in the village," I tell them, looking pointedly at Karin who flushes unattractively and stiffens where she sits. She should have sensed their arrival before I was given any news with regards to this and she knows it. Seems she's gotten lazy in the time I have been lost to my own thoughts.

Perhaps, like me, she thought there was nothing left to look out for.

"What do you mean someone strange?" Juugo asks, frowning at me. His stance is relaxed as he sits in an old chair by the window but I can tell by the set of his muscles and the clench of his jaw that he's alert.

"Someone with a potent chakra and malicious intent. The snakes I've sent out to scout the area tell me that he's a masked man dressed in red and black."

"Akatsuki," Suigetsu breathes, his eyes sparking with barely contained delight. "Do you think it's Itachi's partner? Can we kill him?"

I regard my teammate through cold eyes, weighing up the importance of his opinion on this. Suigetsu followed me partly on the condition that he would be able to get his hands on more of the fabled swords of the Hidden Mist. I never agreed to help him in this endeavour yet it goes without saying that I owe him for his assistance in tracking down Itachi.

Of course, I am essentially a selfish creature and I made no promises.

"You can kill him if you want," I say uncaringly, pivoting back to pick up my katana lying neatly behind the door frame.

"Huh? What are you going to do?" Suigetsu asks, his voice half miffed, half curious.

I glare at him half heartedly. What does it matter what I do now?

"Team Hebi has no purpose now that my brother is dead," I tell the three assembled shinobi, feeling a lot like I imagine Kakashi must have felt when he had to give a lecture to Naruto and I if we happened to get into one of our more serious fights. "I don't particularly want to fight the Akatsuki in some grudge match because I took one of them out. For now, I intend to leave town to avoid them and have no plans beyond that. You are free to do as you wish."

"Oh what?" Suigetsu immediately protests, scrambling up from his cross legged position on the floor and scowling at me like I've just told him his current sword, the executioner, is a fake.

"You're not gonna help me get what I want after I helped you with your Goddamn revenge? You really are the fucking worst Uchiha."

Tense silence engulfs the group following this and I fix Suigetsu with my most withering death glare, knowing that under the fluorescence of these over-hanging lights, that my eyes will have that hint of steel grey that my mother used to say was a little frightening.

Suigetsu drops his bravado act immediately, averting his eyes and pouting like a child.

It's nice to remember that I don't need my sharingan for everything.

"I thought I made it clear when I formed Team Hebi that your business has nothing to do with me. The team was not formed with the mission of accomplishing various goals, it was formed with the intention of tracking and destroying Uchiha Itachi. That mission has been completed. We're done here."

I punctuate this little rant by grabbing one of the ninja packs thrown haphazardly against the wall and striding purposefully towards the door. It's only when I hear the sound of two more packs being picked up that I turn back to look questioningly at Juugo and Karin.

Juugo meets my eyes immediately, his demeanour radiating calm.

"You keep the madness of the curse mark in check. Like I said before, wherever you go, I go."

I stare at him resolutely for a few seconds, weighing up his words and his intentions before nodding once, giving my permission for him to tag along.

Unlike Juugo, Karin seems to be having trouble meeting my eyes directly, constantly biting her lip and pulling on a loose strand of red hair.

She is infuriating.

"Well if you're going to keep disappearing like that…you're going to need a healer close by…"

She has no real reason for following me at all.

I'm not really sure what to make of this utter lack of real motivation but whatever. My eyes trail across to Suigetsu.

"Seriously? _Like seriously? _You guys suck!" Suigetsu hurls at us before picking up the last pack and stomping over to join us at the doorway.

"Hn," I grunt out, the only sound of approval these idiots are going to get for their misguided choices before we take off, across the village limits in a matter of minutes and darting through the trees.

As we run from the Akatsuki and yet more confrontations that I simply can't be done with, I let myself listen to the multiple thuds of bark beneath boot as they stay true to their intentions and follow me, even Suigetsu who could be engaged in a death match with his own personal Itachi right now.

And yes, I feel something…possibly gratitude.

* * *

We travel hard through the rainy season stopping only when necessary for a night or two of comfort in a town or a village here and there. I move with conviction, deciding that I'll dedicate my time to finding a cure for this time travelling nonsense and ultimately end up leading my comrades back to a few of Orochimaru's more well established lairs, the places he deemed safe enough to hide some of his forbidden scrolls. The others are not exactly thrilled at the idea of having to spend time in hideouts that once belonged to their tormentor but they don't argue, even when I'm bold enough to lead them back to the biggest place, a cave network large enough to be considered a natural labyrinth that he and Kabuto spent a good few years developing.

It was here that I first asked Suigetsu to join me and it's here that my chidori enhanced sword sliced through Orochimaru while he was vulnerable in the time just before he was planning on taking my body.

I wonder if things might have turned out differently if I had already destroyed my brother…if I had convinced myself that there was nothing left to live for.

The place is dark and dusty from months of misuse and inevitably, it has the same vacant feel as the Uchiha compound in Konoha did after everyone was killed. Because of the resemblance to my old 'home', I'm able to move down into the shadows without hesitation, almost forgetting that the others won't be used to a place marked with such inactivity.

I turn back and give them a look that I hope is understanding. I'm not a patient person but I'll wait for them to adjust to something like this. Abandonment is not exactly a feeling one can simply deal with if they haven't truly seen it before.

Eventually, Suigetsu is the one to take the first tentative step forward, his eyes surprisingly steely as he pauses by my side. I almost feel the urge to smile at him but don't. The urge is foreign and my emotions are far too crippled for such an outright display of approval. Instead, I turn my gaze from him and walk onward into the darkness, heading first to my old room to ditch my pack and the other travelling items I've managed to accumulate in the last couple of months and then stalking off towards the library.

At first, the others stick to me like glue, pushing themselves into the musty comfort the library has to offer whilst I start to rifle through various heavy tomes and mentally start preparing a cataloguing system to make my searching more efficient. When it becomes apparent that I won't be doing anything else for a while, the others gradually start to disperse to find their own living quarters and eventually, I am left alone with my work, carefully thumbing through a scroll of temporal theory.

Karin only sees fit to bother me when she thinks I might be hungry and the 4 us sit down to a camp fire in the cave centre where the cave opens up at the top to let out the smoke like a chimney.

"I forgot how convenient this place actually was," Suigetsu comments idly, watching the smoke curl up from the camp fire towards the mouth of the cave, disappearing into the gaps in the rocks.

"I forgot how many scrolls Orochimaru had," Karin says, pulling out something she's picked up from the library. "Ugh…if this is what a forbidden jutsu looks like then I don't think I'm interested."

She throws the scroll down on the ground by her feet and I angle my head, curious to know what would make her say something like that, recoiling when I find myself looking at a jutsu that essentially strips a person's blood from their body all in one go so they are left as something less than a lifeless husk, a sack of skin and bones…

"Have you managed to find anything useful about the time travel jutsu yet?" Suigetsu asks, looking at me with hopeful eyes. Convenient as this place may be, he's not exactly eager to stay here and I really can't blame him. For most of his time here, he was trapped in a mostly fluid form inside a cylinder, repeatedly tested on and repeatedly ignored until he probably went near stir crazy from boredom.

I shake my head.

"I don't think this is something I can find the answer to in a day. You'll need to be patient," I tell him, slightly reproachful.

"Hm…" Suigetsu hums out his disappointment but through the fire, his eyes almost seem to be twinkling. It reminds me of the look Naruto used to get when he was planning something particularly mischievous.

"Ne, Sasuke…where do you go when you time travel anyway?"

There's a jolt of something heavy inside me in response to this question and it feels like indigestion…no, maybe nausea…no, definitely indigestion. They haven't actually asked me this question before, maybe because we've never really been safe enough to have this conversation, or I've never been sane enough…but I can't tell them that I've visited Naruto twice, they'll just read in to something that plainly isn't there.

'_** do you believe so wholeheartedly in this kit's power because you love him?**__'_

Stupid fox putting stupid thoughts into my head.

"Oh, hey…are you blushing? For seriously real? Oh man…I didn't even know you _could _blush! If I went somewhere that made me look like _that _every time I time travelled, I sure as hell don't think I'd be looking as hard as you are to find a cure!"

It takes everything I have and more not to throw a kunai at that idiot's throat.

I'm focussed so intently on not harming one of my comrades that I hardly notice the sharingan spinning into place, flashing a crimson warning through the half shadows of the cave as Suigetsu chortles out his amusement.

His mirth dies when he catches sight of my eyes, immediately bringing his hands up in front of him.

"Uh…Sasuke? Chill man…"

There is a slight tick in my left eye that lets me know I am acting out irrationally to this idiot's glee over what he assumes to be the events of my personal life and this irrationality more than Suigetsu's delusional accusations, is worrying.

_Why is this such a big deal?_

_**'you love him?**__'_

I really hate that stupid fox.

_**'Mark my words boy, this kit will be the death of you but not in the way that you'd like to think.'**_

Yeah…I think I'm beginning to see that. Though I don't think Naruto will be the death of me in quite the way the fox assumes he will be either.

* * *

_Sasuke is 16, Naruto is 16_

Unsurprisingly, I'm reading when I next travel. The book I've found is about the theory of the summoning jutsu, breaking down how a creature can be transported from one place to another with no need to travel for a long time over long distance. It isn't one of Orochimaru's more coveted scrolls so I don't feel quite as disrespectful as I might've done when the book drops out of my fading hands onto the hard floor, its spine bending almost irreparably.

The transition from one time to another is a little bit more uncomfortable this time because I'm tired and my body already aches in that sort of weary way it does when you haven't been getting a lot of sleep lately. Slowly, the library around me warps, the shadows of the half light from the lamps contorting until I feel like I'm seeing monsters encroaching on me. There is a brief flicker of unfounded fear in my gut and then I've blacked out, coming to what feels like seconds later in the middle of what can only be described as outright chaos.

There is a battle going on, that is apparent immediately as I hear the sound of startled screams half choked and catch a glimpse of variously graded ninja running across the rooftops of a series of geometric buildings, half of the crumbling structures already smashed to ruin. I appear to have woken up in some sort of open space courtyard, the worst possible place to be in the middle of something like this where you have no idea who's side you're on or if any one of them will come at any moment with the intention of taking your head. There are a few pillars holding up a balustrade but considering the destruction around me, I don't really trust their structural integrity to provide any sort of shelter from this madness.

In the middle of the courtyard is a large black box which is giving off the sort of energy that makes my teeth buzz, a little like the way Orochimaru made me feel when he was acting particularly evilly but in a much more concentrated dose.

The 'box' appears to be open at the moment, giving out a pulse of shadowed energy that reminds me a little of Naruto when he was consumed by the Kyuubi.

This can't exactly be good.

I wonder if I'm going to make a habit of appearing in these less than favourable situations.

There is a loud shriek that sets my teeth on edge and my head whips up so my eyes can lock on to what is possibly the weirdest thing I've ever seen - an elongated, tar-like mess of a monster with huge protruding teeth, bat like wings and gorilla-like knuckles punctuating the end of sinewy arms currently buried in the ruined roof tiles of one of the geometric buildings. Its anatomy is weird, warped and reflective of some kind of insane influence - all long limbs and stunted body, huge mouth and lack of eyes or nose. If there was a god like the kind some people believe created all things, then he was clearly having a mental breakdown when he thought this thing up.

The creature looks, for all its worth, rather battered. Its 'chest' is heaving valiantly as it struggles to breathe and its huge fingers are twitching as blood oozes from various wounds. There is a man standing in front of it, a man that reminds me of Hyuuga Neji with long, dead straight hair and an expression on his narrow face that is far too serious.

He's looking to the sky.

I follow his gaze…

…and my heart literally tries to stop in my chest.

There is a ninja falling from the sky like a meteorite with some kind of god-like jutsu in his hand. As he falls, the grey clouds part around him in a spiral, leaving behind an expanse of vibrant blue and a column of sunlight that flashes against the blonde of his hair.

_Naruto?_

"Fuuton: Rasen-shuriken!"

There is barely enough time for me to activate my sharingan to try and start deconstructing this completely over the top monster move that Naruto is currently managing to pull off though I'm able to see that it has its basis in the jutsu he used on me at the Valley of the End before it collides with the monster and a thousand tiny senbon needles of light explode into the atmosphere setting off a repercussive shock wave that almost makes me fall flat back against the concrete of the courtyard.

There's a shriek from the creature as it's completely overwhelmed but I'm not paying attention to the last of the light show or that thing's decimation…

…because Naruto's descent hasn't stopped.

He drops now like a stone, completely spent after using that gargantuan jutsu and though there are ninja around him, they're too busy watching the aftermath of his attack to pay attention to whether or not he's able to save himself from his own kamikaze dive.

_Idiot._

I move.

Using every last scrap of chakra I can, I streak across the courtyard, still completely naked and infuriatingly slower for the stones cutting in to the underside of my bare feet. There is no sound though I'm sure that I've been seen by at least half a dozen shinobi, only the colossal pounding of my heart as I keep my gaze on that falling idiot, my eyes widening in horror when I catch my first glimpse of the hole in his torso, a hole that's clearly obliterated several vital organs.

_How is he still alive?_

As I run, I gather chakra into my feet and launch myself with precision from one of the still standing walls towards Naruto's lax form, my hands gripping the folds of his crimson coat so I can yank him to me and adjust him in my arms. With him like this, I can protect as much of him as possible from the impact. I land heavily, holding his head against my chest and wincing slightly when I can feel the blood steadily pumping out of that god awful wound staining my skin. His breath flutters against my collar bone, miniscule and frightening.

_Shit…shit, shit, shit._

My eyes are already roaming down the length of his body to the wound but if I see it, I'll pass out, or vomit…or disappear…

_Is he dying? Surely he can't…but even if he survives this, he'll be crippled forever…_

The Naruto I met the first time I travelled wasn't crippled…

_What actually determines the future?_

I purposefully stop myself before I actually get a good look at the wound, laying him down carefully though my hands are shaking like I'm the one who's suffering blood loss.

Huh…my hands haven't shaken at all since my parents died, since I vowed to kill Itachi.

_What does this mean?_

I'm glancing around for a medic, someone that can help, hoping against all hope that there's something _someone _can do but his voice calls my attention.

"Sa…suke?"

His eyes are open but they're blood shot and strange. The colour of his irises seems darker than usual, deeper but not as full of depth. He coughs once, a piteous gurgling eruption, an attempt by his body to clear out a lung that may or may not still be intact.

_How is he still alive damnit?_

"Did…I die?" his voice is small and tired and full of something I never thought I'd see in this happy-go-lucky twit, a sadness older and more potent than anything I think I've ever felt.

"Not quite," I snap out at him, slightly surprised by the wobble in my voice. I haven't sounded so unsure since the day my parents died, since I pleaded with my older brother to make it stop.

_Isn't this what I wanted?_

"And if you do die now dobe, you'll really be the usuratonkachi I always said you were."

A taunt designed to get him to fight. Naruto is defiance on an entirely new level after all. I've seen this retard pull off some incredible stunts through his own maddening sense of defiance and willpower.

"Y…you can't b…be here…"

The talking is zapping his energy. With every syllable, his face loses another degree of colour, edging towards oxygen starved greyish blue. I know I should stop him from speaking, try to get him to conserve his strength but I can't.

I just can't.

_Naruto is dying._

"You…can't…b…be here…" Naruto repeats certainly, his eyes taking on that spark of understanding they sometimes get when he's figured something out.

"Y…you hate me…so…y…you're not…h…here."

He's not making a whole lot of sense but it still eats into me a little when he says that I hate him so dismissively. For all the positive attitude he has about everything, could Naruto really think I hate him so forcefully? I've never hated Naruto…not really…even if it was intense dislike it was never hatred…I could never hate him, even when I really wanted to, even when I wanted to break all bonds by turning my reactions to him into hatred, a hatred that would be overshadowed by my brother and easily forgotten…

He starts gasping for air, his body twitching in a way that makes me think of death throes and I think I'm going to be sick even though I haven't seen the wound.

_Naruto…_

I don't want him to die.

I really don't.

_Why? Why do I care so much about this nobody? Why does watching this person die, this person that I nearly killed anyway, make me want to curl in on myself and break?_

"Y…you should…know…e…even if you're n…not the…r…real Sa…aa…suke that…I'm selfish."

_Selfish?_

What is he talking about? Sure, he's always been egotistical, full to the brim and maybe slightly over with self confidence but never selfish. From the moment he was made a ninja, all he's done is try to help people. It's amazing when you think of all the prejudice he used to suffer because of the Kyuubi. If it was me in his place…I probably would have ended up like Gaara.

"I…ch…chased you…s…so hard b…because…I th…think I l…love you."

My heart thuds painfully against my rib cage. The blood pumping heatedly through me, forced round my system by a punch of adrenaline, freezes.

My eyes widen.

_What?_

"I j…just thought…th…thought you…deserved…t…to know…the truth, y'know?"

His body convulses and his head pushes into the ground as his spine arches up beneath him, a reactive response to try and ease a sudden shot of crippling agony. He pulls a face that makes me blanch and though I want to turn away from his suffering, I don't.

I don't because he just told me he loves me.

What exactly does he mean by that?

_What?_

The way he's arching up makes him fall with a thud to his side where he starts to shudder, folding over the hole in his chest to make the hole in his back more prominent. I catch a glimpse of shredded muscle, sinew and shattered bone before squeezing my eyes tight shut.

There's no way that he could survive this.

_The future is wrong._

"I…it's important f…for you t…to know th…that even th…though…though you killed…y…your brother…"

I flinch but only feel the barest squirm of anger towards this half corpse for bringing Itachi up. It's the least I've reacted to a direct comment about my affairs in months.

"…y…you're not…alone."

My face twitches.

_Not alone…_

Who does he think he is to tell me I'm not alone…as if his love makes a difference to me.

_His love…_

_Not alone…_

_Naruto…_

Have I gone forward in time or back? If I return to my own time and head to Konoha immediately, can I save him from this? What is even going on here?

Panic churns through my gut, panic and something like despair and anger and the hatred that's been buried since I managed to destroy my brother and it's all too much.

I can feel myself starting to shut down, becoming emotionally numb to this in much the same way as I became emotionally numb to the massacre. By the time the horror of the Mangekyou illusion was over, watching my mum and dad being killed repeatedly for 24 hours, I had become nothing more than a shell to house a myriad of physical reactions to heavy trauma.

Thus I feel nothing as I raise a violently quivering hand to lace my fingers through the matted tresses of his blonde hair. If he can feel me touching him so intimately, he doesn't react and because he doesn't react, I begin to let my fingers run through the knotted lengths in a soothing motion.

_Naruto…_

His breath is coming in short, shallow bursts. He no longer has the strength to speak though I know there's probably a lot more he wants to say. Then, as my hand runs under the tilt in his skull through his hair, his body suddenly goes rigid, taut and his eyes fly open, widening impossibly.

He lets out a choked scream, throwing himself onto his back and arching up again, his muscles shivering. I let out a whimper and move back on a reflex, watching through terrified eyes as he vomits up a thick bubble of blood that erupts over his chin and neck. It's sticky and dark and this isn't the first time I've seen someone die but I'm reacting like it is.

"No…no…" I mumble uselessly, my face growing hot with grief as the remaining light starts to drain rapidly out of his blue eyes.

"You can't die here you damn dobe."

But he can and he does, falling limply, almost gracefully back onto the hard concrete, his eyes sliding closed. He takes a couple more shallow breaths before exhaling particularly deeply and then it's all over.

And I wait…

…to disappear or to cease functioning, for him to jump up and proclaim that this was all an act to get me to connect with my lesser let out emotions…

…for something…

_Anything…_

"Get out of the way."

My head snaps back over my shoulder at the sound of the foreign voice, catching a glimpse of a girl with a similar wound to Naruto's. She's clutching at the hole in her abdomen with a white knuckled hand but her expression is steely, her jaw hard as she grits her teeth to appear strong.

Subconsciously, I find myself shuffling forward, closer to the body of my friend. I have no idea if she's an enemy or not.

In response to this defiance, she limps forward, fixing me with a strange look through pale eyes as she drops down before him and I growl, a low sound escaping from somewhere deep in my chest.

_She will not touch him._

"I can save him," she tells me slowly, meeting my eyes though the sharingan is fully activated, with a clear gaze.

I scrutinise her for a moment, weighing her up, considering her wound and how it's similar to Naruto's…

Did he launch himself in to save her like the retard he is?

Yes, I think he did.

It goes against every instinct inside me but I move back, my eyes snaking down to Naruto's vacant face and this girl, this random stranger that I know nothing about starts to glow abnormally, a white aura shifting around her like some sort of ethereal light.

My eyes flick over to her, my sharingan automatically cataloguing how she's able to produce such a unique chakra and I recoil slightly when I realise what's happening.

_She's pouring every last ounce of chakra inside her into some sort of kekkai genkai._

Only when her body is literally an empty shell, a dark patch of empty chakra coils within the shape of this woman surrounded by the physical manifestation of chakra does she move, leaning over Naruto, her white hair floating over his ruined body. She says something to him, her eyes full of affection and longing, and then bends down to press her lips to his bloodied mouth.

There is a flicker of some sort of emotion inside me but I don't have the presence of mind to identify it right now.

As I watch, the external chakra that this girl has been able to create pours out through the kiss into his chakra coils, filling them up and igniting the fire within his stomach. His skin suddenly pulses into a much more healthy colour, closer to the tan I'm used to and as she pulls away, crumpling down beside him, his chest rises, expanding considerably as he takes in a breath.

_Naruto…_

I'm starting to disappear, I can feel it pulling on the edge of my senses and somewhere deep inside, I mentally thank whatever deity I don't believe in for letting me stay long enough to see that he is going to be alright. As the now familiar black spots start to breech the edges of my vision, I turn my attention to the limp cadaver situated beside Naruto, the reason that he was able to live through this impossible situation.

I stare at it but don't express any gratitude.

* * *

_So yeah, reference to 'Blood Prison' because I thought it would be cool to ground Naruto's death scene in something that everyone knew. Yay for not quite canon and all its uses._

_Hope you enjoyed the chapter guys!_


	4. Love and Time Can Only Be Spent

_AN: I have a horrible feeling that my half assed attempt to edit this has all been for nought so I apologise in advance for spelling errors and whatnot, my concentration is absolutely shot at the moment and that's pretty bad considering I'm usually pretty easily distracted at the best of times._

_Love for __**eskimo-cones **__and __**Sneaky-Ninja-Muffin **__for commenting! This chapter is out because you guys liked it!_

* * *

**4: Love and Time Can Only Be Spent**

_Sasuke is 16_

I return to the library, appearing on top of Karin who is gathering my clothes up, half squashing her as I crash into existence, sweating and shaking and trying not to throw up.

"Ah!" Karin exclaims eloquently, heaving herself out from under me and staring at me with abandon as I sit cross legged and completely naked on the hard stone floor.

Her mouth quivers into a little smile as she watches me and I muster up a scowl, wordlessly holding out my hand for my underwear and trousers.

"Er…oh, sorry Sasuke, I just thought that…well you know, I was just going to fold them," she tells me in a voice a few octaves higher than normal as she hands me my clothes, her expression disappointed as I slide them on.

"Hn," I mutter by the way of some sort of comment to all this inanity. "Have you heard anything recently about Naruto?"

The question obviously throws her magnificently. She splutters for a moment, her glasses sliding down her nose and her eyes widening comically as she regards me. The expression on her face clearly says: '_really? _' and I simply look at her with the full resolve I'm currently feeling.

_Yes, this last time travelling trip changed everything. No, you don't need to tell me the details._

"I thought you weren't interested in the rumours about Konoha," Karin states suspiciously, handing over my shirt and watching me pull it over my head. "What exactly happened when you left this time?"

"It's none of your business," I tell her immediately, glaring at her with the sort of eyes that have made more intimidating shinobi crumble. She is, unfortunately, used to me though, her eyes narrowing to unattractive slits of red and for a moment, I have to remind myself that I'm not looking at that blasted fox demon.

"I heard something in town…about a week ago when I was sent for supplies," she admits grudgingly, obviously unsure of how I'll react to news of my old home. I try to keep my face as impassive as I'm usually able to though weirdly, it's hard.

"You know how the Akatsuki is after the tailed beasts…well, one of them, their leader, went for the jinchuuriki of Konoha."

My heart is pounding and I have to really fight not to double over and retch uselessly. Asking this question immediately after returning from a time travelling trip may not have been my smartest move but damnit, I need to know.

"Konoha was destroyed but they say that the jinchuuriki defeated the Akatsuki leader."

Karin cringes as she tells me that last part, obviously afraid that I'll erupt in a fit of childish rage over the idea that Naruto has become so powerful but, having seen that colossal jutsu he was using in whatever time I've just been to, I'm not surprised somehow that he was able to defend himself so well.

I think…well, I might actually be feeling some strange echo of pride.

He really is worthy to call himself my rival.

Something resembling a smile flitters over my face.

"We're going," I tell her bluntly, making my mind up on a whim and striding forward, all thoughts of researching the time travelling jutsu forgotten for now.

As I stride out into the corridor and make my way briskly back to my quarters to start packing, I feel better than I have done in months because now, I have a real purpose again.

Karin lopes behind me, having trouble matching my longer strides.

"Uh…going where?" She asks me, her expression now reflecting the sort of concern she would get when I would was particularly obsessive about revenge in the past. I must look as determined as I feel.

"Back to Konoha," I tell her simply, pushing the door to my room open and grabbing the few meagre things that I actually need.

"To Konoha?" Karin repeats, her eyes following me as I move about the room, hovering in the doorway like some sort of awkward, unwanted visitor. "But I thought you had no interest i-

"Karin," I say, addressing her carefully and turning to face her with all the respect I can manage. My eyes find hers and she shuts up, her mouth slipping closed. "You are under no obligation to follow me if you don't want to. I will not force anyone to follow me further now I intend to go back to the Leaf. I do think you might like it there if you came with me and I have no doubt the Leaf would welcome you with your unique talents."

Her mouth drops openly a little as she exhales and tries to find something to say. There are emotions swimming in her eyes that I can't quite give a name to but there is the telltale hint of loneliness behind the glare of her glasses and she closes her mouth again, letting her hair fall forward as she stares at the floor.

"I'll let the others know," she says, her voice melancholy and suddenly tired. "When did you want to go?"

I grab some of the scrolls I've been collecting from the library from a little dressing table, shoving them into my pack and making a mental note to return with someone a little more adept at solving temporal riddles before pointedly pulling on my shoes.

"As soon as possible," I tell her with conviction, pleased when she disappears from my doorway on swift feet to tell the others of my new plan.

_I'm going home._

Karin said that it's been destroyed. There probably isn't a compound adorned with the Uchiha fan anymore and my parent's graves have probably been irreparably disturbed. The people there I used to know will probably look at me with suspicion and anger for months, years and this is only if I manage to pull something out of my ass and get off with a light punishment for defecting from the council of elders but…

_He is there._

_' you're not…alone.'_

* * *

The Hokage is in a coma, the 6th has been chosen.

_Danzo…_

The name isn't exactly meaningless to me. When we young, I heard about a military faction that trained certain ninja in ANBU ways. The leader was said to be…rather extreme in his ideals, always opposing the peace keeping ways of the 3rd Hokage and causing a bit of a stir when the council didn't entirely agree with him. For a little while, I weighed up the pros and cons of presenting myself to this faction in pursuit of ANBU knowledge for revenge but quickly decided against the idea because of the way they ran - with a lot less freedom than the common ninja, with a lot less accomplishments than the true ANBU.

How did someone like that become the 6th Hokage?

This new information slows us down considerably, stopping us a few miles away from Konoha just outside the borders of the village's security. If this new military man is the Hokage, I doubt I'll be able to persuade him to appeal to the council for a lighter sentence for my defection. If I'm lucky, my achievements in killing Orochimaru and Itachi will land me a life sentence in prison…

At least with Tsunade, I could have shown her the truth of why I've really returned and that alone would probably soften her to my plight.

_I only want to see Naruto…_

At the moment, he's probably deeply encased within Konoha, helping people with the village's reconstruction though they all used to sneer at him or spit at him when Team 7 would meander into town in the old days.

I wonder if I can get a message to him…

Of all the time he's spent chasing me, of all the measures I've taken to try and avoid him, forget about him, how strange it seems that now, when I actually want to talk to him, he's unreachable.

I'm on first duty tonight, waiting by the edge of the campsite with my back pressed against the rough bark of a tree adorned with familiar fan-like leaves. The world around me is pitch black save for a few minute trails of cold light falling down from a full moon and the sepia colour scheme of this night world is oddly comforting.

It's the brilliant colours of the day time that set me on edge recently. Don't ask me why.

I'm sending out my chakra in stable waves around me, keeping tabs on my surroundings so I might catch an enemy setting up an ambush all the while thinking of a way to meet Naruto without the tag along of my team and without a procession to back him up. I'm just considering the pros and cons of a one man stealth mission to the Hokage monument if I can only get information on when he'll be there, perching on the 4th Hokage's head as he used to when we were young and he needed to work something out, when I feel something that makes me start.

_His chakra…_

Close, letting out a pulse similar to mine.

What is this? An attempt by him to widen the scope of Konoha's defences following the Akatsuki attack? Why would he do something like this alone?

_Maybe he's just letting me know that he's here…_

Yes, okay, assuming that Naruto hasn't become the omnipotent being that I met in the future when I first travelled in the space of a few months, perhaps he's just come to meet me on some wild instinct.

And I call Naruto stupid…

Still, I can't let this opportunity pass. It's too good to be true.

Within seconds, I've taken off along the grass, running full pelt over bracken, fallen leaves and newly budding clover beneath the fall of trees with the same fan-like leaves. The closer I get to him, the more distinct the focus of his chakra becomes and what I feel surprises me slightly.

_Something's happened._

His chakra is off. Though its strong and steady, prominent and full as always, there is a taint that wasn't there when I last saw him for that brief moment before engaging my brother, a taint that I know well.

I halt just before I get to the clearing, catching a glimpse of him through a pair of poplar trees, his bright blonde hair shining out even though it only has the half light of the moon to illuminate it. He's wearing the dark red coat he was wearing when I last saw him dropping out of the sky with a fatal wound to his middle and he's sitting cross legged on the grass with his eyes closed, so still that I can't even see him breathing.

_Since when is someone as loud and fidgety as Naruto able to sit as still as that?_

As I watch him, I notice that something is happening to his eyelids, patches of colour starting to coat them like eye shadow. Curious, I activate my sharingan and almost falter as I watch the chakra seeping calmly into his chakra coils from the _outside, _almost like he's drawing on the essence of existence itself for power_._

_Just what is this trick of his? _

"I know you're there Sasuke. There's no point in hiding," Naruto says suddenly, his voice low and…irritated? My left eye twitches in response to his uncharacteristic awareness and I step out into the light, determined to make myself look as dignified but at the same time as harmless as possible.

He stands as I extract myself from the trees, the movement fluid and really rather unlike him. When he turns to face me, his eyes flash open revealing a truly bizarre sight, bright yellow irises made distinct by horizontal pupils. If I didn't know any better, I'd say they looked like the eyes of a frog…

For a moment, the two of us merely stare at each other and I struggle with what to tell him.

_What can I tell him? I don't really know why I'm here…_

"What are you doing here?" I manage eventually, the question extending naturally to 'how did you know I would be here?' without me having to verbalise and a marked look of ire shoots across Naruto's expression as he digs into his trouser pocket to pull out a carefully folded note.

"You asked me to meet you, remember?"

I repress the urge to twitch in response to _this _news. Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the presence of mind my future self obviously has to drop Naruto a note on what can only be another time travelling mishap, essentially saving me the trouble of infiltrating one of the larger ninja villages to try and get an audience with this idiot, but the appearance of forgetting my own note doesn't exactly work in my favour here.

I need to come across at least partially sane if he's going to believe anything I tell him…

_God…he's so close…and so different…_

"Ah," I intone, trying to appear as though I summoned him here on purpose. Attempting to explain to this dobe that this whole meeting has clearly been previously orchestrated by myself but not until later on in the future is futile.

And it's not what I want to talk about at the moment.

"I want to come home," I blurt out in a single arrogant sentence.

The air between us seems to warp into something nitrous as he processes this, his eyes widening until the electric yellow of his pupils flash like illuminated light bulbs in his eye sockets, framed by the weird blood red markings colouring the edges of his eyes. His face becomes taut and drawn with tension in an emotion that I can't quite give a name to and his mouth parts slightly though the intake of breath I can see following this statement is strained.

"…What?"

The word is short and sharp, like a kunai thrown between us in this crucial stalemate. It's cutting, full of accusations and stress and it's nothing less than I deserve, but I still wince as though I wasn't expecting it.

_Did I honestly expect that he would welcome me home with open arms just like that?_

Yes.

Because he chased me for so long, because he fought so hard for our friendship, because in another time not so far away from this one, he told me he loves me.

"My revenge is complete," I tell him, reporting to him as though he is the Hokage and I am merely a ninja giving a verbal recount of a completed mission. "There is nothing else left. I want to come home."

_To the last place in this world that has something worthwhile for me._

His eyebrows furrow slightly, his eyes flash with a million thoughts and eventually, he fixes me with a gaze that could almost be described as shrewd.

"What do you mean there's nothing else left?"

I fight the urge to withdraw into myself following that heavy question, trying desperately to be honest and let Naruto see emotions that I can't quite feel any more. Years of training, of conditioning myself to be nothing more than a vessel of hatred and vengeance is really taking its toll…How can I be more now that I need to be more?

_How can I show him the desolation I felt after Itachi's death? That would clarify what I meant by nothing else left._

"Sasuke?" he asks and the inflection in the way he says my name is almost gentle.

I adjust myself, responding to his tone and verbalise.

"Dobe…Orochimaru is dead. Itachi is dead…There's nothing left for me to do out in the world."

_You're the only thing I have left…_

"So you thought you'd just come on home."

… _And it's terrifying for me to have to do this right now with the possibility of the rejection clouding the new strange colour of your eyes being real._

His jaw sets, his face becomes steely and his muscles shift slightly as he regards me. He was giving off undulating waves of agonised confusion but now, he seems resolute, sure. His feet crunch through the dry grass as he walks towards me, a stride full of the Uzumaki confidence I came to know so well in my genin days. At the time, I thought it unjustified swagger but now, I can see that its actually part of him gearing up to face the impossible.

_Please Naruto…I don't know why I'm here…I don't know why your stupid bond matters so much…just please Naruto…_

He stops when we're literally inches apart, so close that I can feel the edge of his breath brushing against the top of my black vest, causing the fabric to flutter against my sternum. His eyes are so intensely focussed, so hard, sure and full of all the pain I never let myself acknowledge in him that it takes all my willpower to hold his gaze, to show him the truth of my longing to come back home through my own eyes.

I read him.

He reads me.

Yet the punch comes as a complete surprise.

There is a movement that draws my eyes for just a second from his left hand, nothing more than a slight twitch and the next thing I know, something planet sized and solid as titanium has impacted the side of my face and stars explode behind my eyes as I'm thrown half way across the clearing. My back hits the base of one of the trees covered in fan-like leaves and the trunk splinters completely. I end up careening straight through it to the next tree that also splinters before collapsing into a writhing mass on the floor, groaning out my agony as I clutch at my face and try to collect myself, automatically running a surge of chidori through my system as protection whilst I'm otherwise incapacitated. Tears stream down my face in reaction to this attack and it takes a few moments of serious blinking before I can even see vague shapes.

I'm barely able to dodge Naruto's next attack, manoeuvring awkwardly out of the way of another punch only to be met by a chop executed at such a weird angle that I think perhaps Naruto has dislocated one of his arms for the sole purpose of landing a hit on me. I wouldn't put something like that past the dobe. He has no regard for his own safety so long as whatever measure he takes insures victory.

I land on the trunk of the next tree and very pointedly don't draw my sword though I'm itching to feel the handle of the blade beneath my fingers against this more powerful Naruto. Whatever energy he's managed to access through this new trick of his, it's like going up against a god damn bulldozer just faster…a lot faster…

When he comes at me again, utilising a move that's similar in grace to a more complex tai chi stance, again, I'm barely able to dodge without making an aggressive play of my own, utilising the weaknesses of his attacks to devise a strategy for a counter. I don't want to fight him though and I certainly don't want this to escalate. Whatever rage Naruto has to get out of his system against me, I'll take it gladly, I know I deserve nothing better and throwing punches has always cleared the air between us in the past.

I just hope the air hasn't become so fogged that it can no longer be cleared…

_God…_

When I land on the surface of a small stream with a light splash, a growl sounds from the depths of Naruto's throat and a shiver shoots through my spine.

When he lands on the water in front of me, his hands loosely swinging beside him, I find myself staring into the almost familiar crimson gaze of the Kyuubi though my brow furrows slightly when I find myself trying to focus on strange cross shaped pupils, the weird pill shaped horizontal pupils of his newfound strange power and the slit, sharp pupils of the Kyuubi.

_He's combined his two roots of power…should that even be possible?_

I'm so drawn in to the impossibility of these eyes, the implications that they spur in the back of my mind about avenues of power and this idiot's ability to truly breech the boundaries of possibility, that I don't notice the shadow clone hanging above me in the thick canopy of the trees, holding on to one of those spinning balls of wind until it drops down on top of me.

The ball of power Naruto's clone is holding on to connects with my stomach and erupts, causing a rapidly drilling, burning sensation to explode over my abdomen and over my lowest ribs. I grit my teeth against the pain, only vaguely aware as the clone disappears with a pop of smoke to be replaced by the real Naruto who promptly pins my arms to the bank of stream and sits on me, his thighs tight against my hips and his feet locked around my legs to stop me from moving.

A tiny part of me marvels at this hold, at this idiot's obvious improvement in taijutsu. Even if I really wanted to, I couldn't break this particular pin and somehow, that's a little unnerving. This whole thing is…a little unnerving…

_I feel so vulnerable…I don't like it…get off of me Naruto…_

He's breathing hard on top of me and I force myself not to panic like a caged animal in his grasp, keeping my eyes fixed on his as they start flashing like a series of strobe lights in fast motion between bright yellow, Kyuubi red and his own, original blue.

"Why won't you fight back?" he hisses out, his voice cutting like a whip through the silence that's fallen over us. As his anger intensifies with the question, his whisker marks start to become more prominent and as I shift slightly beneath him, he snarls and I can see that his canines have begun to elongate.

I simply let myself look at him, projecting as much sincerity through my expression as I can muster.

And my emotions sit raw on my chest.

_Can he feel their burn through his body because we're so close?_

"Maybe I don't want to hurt you anymore," I tell him.

He stares at me and I flinch against the expression. His eyes snap into the singular red colour of the Kyuubi, the colour of his mouth darkens and his hair starts to bristle against a choking heat that I can feel pushing deep into my arms, hips and legs from his body.

The air begins to hiss as the Kyuubi's potent chakra begins to leak from him.

"Liar!" he yells out, un-pinning my arms so he can grab the front of my vest and lift me up, slamming my head down against the bank of the stream. The earth there is muddy and wet so I feel no pain but the force behind that action is enough to intimidate.

"Of course you want to hurt me! Your brother may be dead but he spent a long time cultivating all that hatred inside you. Something like that doesn't just disappear Sasuke so fight me seriously! I can take it, your hatred, all of it!"

The way he says that…

_'…all that hatred inside you. Something like that doesn't just disappear…_'

What happened while I sought revenge against my brother?

_What exactly has Naruto been through?_

There is something in the way he's looking at me through the Kyuubi's eyes, something devastating and suddenly, I don't need to think about giving the right impression through projecting my sincerity, I don't need to think about the complexity of showing emotions I've become accustomed to burying because, at the moment, I couldn't hide them if I tried. My eyes latch on to his and for this moment, we really see each other.

"Naruto," I say, his name a soft lilt in the air. I've never used this voice before. I didn't even know it could be this gentle.

"I'm done…I don't want to hurt you anymore."

His expression changes instantly, the rage dropping off of his face like water to be replaced with a shock that burns me to my core. The air that was starting to become unbearably hot cools to a normal temperature and his eyes fade gradually to his usual blue. I've never been so relieved to see that virulent colour, those eyes.

_This _is the Naruto I know. _This _is the Naruto I risked coming back to Konoha to see.

His hands are still bunched up in the fabric of my shirt leaving my arms free. I'm sure he knows that he's left himself open but he doesn't move to pin me properly again. It's the smallest sign that, at least subconsciously, he still trusts me enough not to take advantage of him.

"…Then what do you want?" he asks in a defeated voice, so quiet that I have to tilt my head to catch his words.

My chest clenches when I hear the true weary misery in his tone.

_What will fill the void left by the hatred?_

I let my mind go into overdrive for a moment, contemplating my answer but in the end, I know I can only tell the truth. To him and only him.

"I don't know," I admit carefully, feeling his fingers tighten in my vest. "I think I might just want to live."

He's looking at me as if I've grown a second head, as if he would like nothing more than to move away from me and put some distance between us and this look scares me but I persevere with what I'm saying, determined to follow in Naruto's footsteps and continue on guts alone.

"Will you let me try?" I ask him carefully, knowing I'm pushing it a little and knowing that at this point, I need to.

A million different emotions flash through the depths of his blue eyes like the tantalising flicker of fish below the surface of the water and just as I feared, he pushes himself up and backs away, shaking his head, blonde locks flying out over his head.

And I can't actually hide how crushed I am.

It's the worst feeling I've experienced in a long time.

I feel vulnerable, more naked than I've ever felt on one of my time travelling escapades and smaller than I was when I faced Itachi on the night of the massacre.

_Naruto…_

"Don't tell me you're finally giving up on me…" I whisper, almost surprised to hear the catch in my throat, to feel the lump and the tears threatening to press against the edges of my eyes.

_How mortifying…_

_Ninjas _don't _cry Naruto._

"Just when I've given in to your foolish wish to return to Konoha."

He glares at me through steely blue eyes, his lips pursed in what could be annoyance.

"I've given up on giving up," he tells me solidly, a statement that makes me frown because it's a weird concept and fits Naruto to a T.

He's thought about this.

Hard.

"Teme, truth be told, this is too easy. It doesn't feel right and I don't understand _how _when you were so hell bent on cutting all ties with our home, you can just return out of the blue like this but even if this is some kind of crazy trap or whatever, I don't care because you're back and I'm not gonna waste this chance to _genuinely _persuade you that coming home legitimately is the right choice."

I blink at him.

He thinks this is all some sort of elaborate plot? When did he become so suspicious?

_He fought and destroyed the Akatsuki leader…the Akatsuki who are after the tailed beasts and have been since he was 12…_

What kind of life has he been living up until now? How often has he been hunted?

Whatever he thinks though, I can't help the feeling of relief that washes through my body, making my knees feel weak.

_I'm not too late…_

"I don't trust you," Naruto tells me simply and though I know that should hurt, it doesn't because right now, it doesn't matter if he's willing to give me another chance to earn his trust again.

"But I haven't stopped believing in you."

_Naruto…_

His eyes are clear of turmoil now, glinting as the first rays of sunlight bathe the world in a burst of fiery orange and in that moment, he smiles at me, a poor impression of the grin that used to split his face but it's a start.

"Welcome home teme."

* * *

I tell him immediately about my comrades back at our make shift camp and make a point of asking for leniency in their treatment. Naruto's demeanour towards me seems to lighten a little bit following this request and, in a direct correlation that seriously baffles me, my own mood lightens as well. We have a brief discussion about how to go about presenting my return to Danzo as the sun continues to drift lazily upwards, both of us sitting with our backs to each other on the bank of the stream. We toss a few ideas back and forth just like we used to on missions as genin and this discussion is so surreal…sitting with Naruto like this is so surreal…

_He says he doesn't trust me but at the moment, it feels like nothing's changed._

"Argh! This is all so messed up. If you'd decided to do this even a couple of weeks ago, you could've just gone straight to the old hag and everything would be fine!"

He lifts up his arms and runs his calloused hands through the wild tresses of his hair, grabbing on to chunks of obnoxious blonde and pulling, groaning when he can't think of anything new. The movement is animated and over-the-top, so very much the Naruto I knew as a kid that I can't help the small, foreign smile that tries to edge across my face.

When he flops against my back, letting the tension in his body go, I stiffen on a reflex but don't move.

He sinks down against me until his head and shoulders are supported entirely by my frame and I crane my neck so I can see over my shoulder, my eyes fixed on the top of his head. He lets out a large huff, a movement I can feel through my spine and the sensation is both disconcerting and comforting.

_That I could be so close to another human being without wanting to kill them…this is what Naruto does to people…_

"Perhaps I should take a leaf out of your book and simply go for a straight forward approach," I remark passively, watching a water skipper jumping across the surface of the stream.

"Yeah right teme, Danzo'd execute you on the spot," Naruto mutters dejectedly behind me, lifting his arm up to rest it over his eyes against the light.

"Not if I offered him something he couldn't refuse," I respond dryly, an idea springing to mind that is at once repulsive but at the same time, the only way I can see of going forward.

"Like what?" Naruto snorts.

"Like my sharingan."

Naruto inhales and holds his breath as that sentiment drops between us then he shifts slightly, craning his own neck so the corners of our eyes meet.

"You wouldn't really give him your eyes would you?"

"Not mine," I admit, the thought of being blind, of someone like Danzo walking around with the Uchiha coveted sharingan, quite honestly sickens me to my core. I don't think I could go on without my sight.

"But if I had children with someone from the village and those children happened to bear the sharingan, they would be loyal to Konoha…Konoha would gain back the sharingan that it was famous for."

Naruto's skin pales slightly as the notion of this idea truly sinks in. His lips purse and he pushes himself up to turn and face me properly, looking me in the eye. I almost miss the warmth of another body pressed like that to my back in such a companionable position but it would be a lie to say I'm not relieved that he's moved. Somehow I'm able to think clearer without him so close.

"Sasuke," Naruto says, his eyes serious. "That's fucked up."

"Really?" I say in a companionable manner, as though we're discussing nothing more complex than training tactics. "I think it's plausible."

"You can't just…offer yourself up like some kind of prized poodle to be bred! Think about what you'd be asking yourself to do! You'd have to have…_sex! _With…_someone!_"

He punctuates this ludicrous prudishness with an animated arm flail that makes me want to smile again. If he's talking like that about sex then…I suppose I can draw the conclusion that he's still a virgin. I can't exactly boast about my sexual encounters considering I really have been too caught up in revenge to think about it at all but somehow, it's a relief that we're still pretty much in the same boat in that department.

"Last time I checked, sex was rather enjoyable," I say, a purposefully ambiguous statement designed to make him think I'm more experienced than I actually am.

_Okay, I admit it, I'm teasing him just a little bit._

Naruto blinks a few times, his eyes growing huge and round as dinner plates, his mouth opening just a fraction. The look he's giving me is so comical that I actually have to fight the urge to laugh at him.

"Eeeeeeeeeeh? Are you saying you've already…with _who?_"

I raise an eyebrow at him, giving him his answer non-verbally before turning my attention back to the matter at hand.

"I don't think it would be so bad if that was all I had to do to have the chance to go home Naruto. It's unethical but that's fine."

Naruto's expression is suddenly desolate and I frown at him, asking without asking what the matter is. Strange how we can still communicate without having to verbalise everything. Naruto is able to read my subtleties better than the other companions I've had over the years, companions that constantly tell me they think I'm somewhat emotionally retarded.

"Sasuke, during Pain's invasion…well…Konoha was destroyed. The Uchiha compound…your home…it's not there anymore. We're rebuilding but…"

I give him a side long glance that says a lot of different things.

_I know that._

_I never really thought of the Uchiha compound as my home after my parents were killed._

_You are the last thing I have left idiot._

I sigh when Naruto just continues to look mournful and fall back until I'm lying in the dry grass with my arms under my head.

"It doesn't matter dobe."

We're silent for a long moment, each of us lost to our own thoughts before I harden my resolve on the matter and stand, wincing against the feeling of caked mud on my back and in my hair. When I glance down at Naruto, I can see that he too is covered in mud from where he was leaning against me.

If there was any doubt in my resolve, it disappears upon seeing that. I want a chance to sit with him like that again and I'll do whatever it takes to make that happen.

"Naruto…I'm going to see the Hokage now. I appreciate you coming when you received my note and for accepting my need to come home. It was important that I spoke to you first."

Naruto is on his feet in about 5 seconds, opening his mouth to protest my sudden foolhardiness but on a reflex, I slide to the side of him and touch a couple of crucial pressure points in his neck before he can react, watching unhappily as his eyes dull and close, catching him as he goes limp, my arms sliding quickly beneath his arm pits.

I drop down with him, holding him carefully with his head against my shoulder and place him gently on the grass, brushing a lock of unruly hair from his face.

For a couple of seconds, I simply watch him as he sleeps, appreciating the gentle rise and fall of his chest as breathes and wondering when I'll see him again. Then I uncoil from my crouched position beside him and take off into the trees towards the camp site, intent on getting the others ready before Naruto rouses and chases after us.

_I wonder how pissed off he'll be when he wakes up…guess I have another black eye coming my way._

Oddly, the thought makes me feel better about what's to come.

* * *

Konoha's decimation…

…hits me like one of Naruto's more emotionally fuelled punches.

I'm not entirely sure what I was expecting to find upon returning to the village, debris, a mass of broken buildings, streets laden with body bags waiting to be buried in the graveyard but as we move towards the entrance to the village, towards the gates I remember leaving behind as a genin, what we see is nothing short of a levelled wasteland, destruction so potent, so absolute, that I can't even make out where the cobbled pathways running through the village used to be.

_Just how powerful was the Akatsuki leader to reduce Konoha to this where even Orochimaru at the height of his power failed? How powerful did Naruto have to be to defeat him?_

Karin's whimpering alerts me to the fact that we've been surrounded by a small legion of ANBU but I don't turn my attention to them immediately, still staring at the crater that was once an entire nation's ninja village, at the rubble ringing the edge of Konoha's walls like a cup stain on a coaster, at the space where the Uchiha compound used to stand, nothing but a mass of upturned earth now.

_It doesn't matter dobe._

And it didn't…doesn't…

Whatever I had in that compound, whatever my life was, I honestly don't care that there's nothing to remember it by…nothing to remember any of them by…

_People's thoughts should not dwell on the dead._

"Uchiha…Sasuke?"

The muffled voice of a masked ANBU rouses me out of my stupor. I turn impassive eyes on the man standing before us, an ANBU I recognise from the chuunin exam many years ago by the particular unique style of his hair poking up through the top of the mask. He's flanked on either side by two more ANBU who are standing completely still, their postures giving nothing away.

I make sure to look superior as I reply, tilting my chin up in the way my father always used to when he was addressing the subordinates of his police force.

"I am here to see the current Hokage," I tell them, my voice ringing with unquestionable confidence.

There is a pause following this announcement as the ANBU think about this, gauging me and trying to work out if I have some sort of ulterior motive. I simply sit back and let them draw their conclusions, willing the others to remain calm in the face of the fairly intimidating Konoha elite. Eventually, the ANBU that I recognise from my days as a genin nods to me and more ANBU appear from the trees, an elite escort in case we should try something suspicious.

They surround us on all sides, each of them taking up a mark on my companions which makes Suigetsu squirm. I shoot him a warning look as we begin our descent into the crater that was once the village, my eyes glinting coldly as he pouts like a child.

As we move down into the base of the crater, I can see the foundations of new construction sites being laid out so that Konoha can start rebuilding. As we draw closer, I get my first glimpse of the people milling about over the rubble, salvaging what they can and working in large groups to try and keep society functioning as best it can in the current circumstances. The foundations being laid are for the busiest and most crucial businesses so that Konoha can re-establish trade as fast as possible and this makes sense to me.

There is only a single ramshackle building in the centre of the current priorities that sticks out like a sore thumb because this wasn't an essential re-build whatsoever but still, it makes me smirk.

_Ichiraku Ramen._

We take an extremely convoluted route to the Hokage's current makeshift headquarters which tells me a lot about my own reputation within Konoha. Rogue ninjas were only ever brought in discreetly when the ninja escorting them were afraid of the reaction of the public should they be paraded through the streets. I suppose my appearance directly after the Akatsuki's invasion would put people on edge considering I was affiliated with someone else that tried to destroy the Leaf for years…

Eventually, we're stopped outside a large wooden cabin towards the back of the village near where the Hokage tower used to stand and one of the ANBU disappears inside. After a few minutes, he reappears and beckons me inside, making a motion to the others that they are to stay put. I enter the cabin with a steely expression and my heart thudding painfully against my throat, squinting against the dim darkness at the man sitting rigidly in a large chair at the back of the room behind a large wooden desk.

He doesn't look up as I enter, scribbling a harsh chicken scratch across a scroll instead with the utmost concentration and weirdly, this makes my jaw clench. For all the fondness Tsunade must have shed for me over the years considering what I did to her favourite ninja, how I've hurt him, I still believe she would grace me with enough common decency to acknowledge me if I were to walk into the room after nearly 5 years of absence from the village.

I make a point of not speaking, my eyes boring holes into the top of Danzo's head as he writes, hoping that my unnerving scrutiny will make his hand falter on the words he's so carefully thinking about but no such luck. I examine him with abandon, taking in the very careful placement of bandages over his body, the scars on his weather worn face, the flash of colour in his eye, like weak black tea, as he writes and the robe he wears - a comfortable choice for someone getting on in age but still expected to move as though he is still a younger man.

He meets my eyes only when he's finished the letter, reaching across the desk for the Hokage's seal and stamping the scroll shut. I'm immediately struck by this man's absolute sense of self certainty and within a glance, I know that he is at least marginally less intelligent than me.

"Uchiha," he says in an old, frail voice that doesn't fool me for a second. Old he may be but if he's the Hokage, he definitely isn't weak.

I remember vaguely that I want this man to at least co-operate with my desires as I incline my head to acknowledge his superior rank, biting the inside of my lip to hold the acerbic remarks making my tongue taste like acid.

"_This _is an unexpected honour and one that I am not fooled by," Danzo begins by telling me, his visible eye narrowing into a suspicious slit. Suddenly I'm reminded of what Naruto told me not hours before and my breath hitches slightly in my throat.

_'I don't trust you…but I still believe in you._'

"It seems rather too much of a coincidence that you, the snake's subordinate, should show up on the very eve of Konoha's destruction like some sort of harbinger of further discord and I really am forced to wonder what you could possibly gain by presenting yourself so freely to me."

Hn, perhaps my initial supposition about his intelligence was a little hasty.

"I'm returning home," I tell him simply, showcasing the truth of my words through my expression in the vain hope that he'll accept this truth as Tsunade might have if she were still Hokage.

Danzo levels with me, his expression reflecting a morbid sort of curiosity and below that, a misplaced excitement that he can barely contain. It's truly disconcerting to be looked at like I'm nothing more than some sort of misplaced valuable trinket he's only now just found.

"Why?" he asks stiffly, his teeth clacking as his mouth snaps shut following this question, giving me the floor to explain myself.

"Orochimaru and my brother are dead," I tell him lightly. "I have no further need to be away from my home."

_From Naruto…_

Danzo stares at me for a long time, his mind obviously fighting to work around this chosen course of action. I suppose from an outsider's perspective, I'm nothing more than an egoist constantly taking advantage of situations to further my own goals and something like this that can only cause me hindrance is massively out of character. I'd be lying if I said that egoism wasn't a huge part of who I am, why I've come back…

I came back because Naruto is here and, now, I believe that he is the best thing for me, even if I have to endure the punishments of Konoha for becoming a rogue ninja.

"You do realise that traditionally, rogue ninjas are put to death upon their return to the village," Danzo tells me, as though explaining the way of the world to a small kid.

I nod once, a slight incline of the head.

"I believe that I can sway you away from that course of action," I tell him, letting my eyes flash with the brilliant red of the sharingan for a second or so before letting the more natural black assume dominance.

"I'd like to make an offer."

For a few minutes, Danzo's face remains frozen in a decidedly impassive expression as he considers my words, runs through every possible meaning and makes a decision about whether or not he wants to listen to my proposition.

I hold my breath where I stand and pray that I've judged his character correctly.

_Is this man driven by enough greed to listen to me?_

My heart hammers in my chest as I wait for his verdict but like him, I make sure I appear apathetic. To an outsider, we must look like nothing more than ninja mannequins in this most crucial moment…

Eventually, Danzo breaks the silence that settles over us and I flinch almost imperceptibly at the sound of his voice.

"What kind of offer Uchiha?"

I have to fight the urge to smirk as he takes the bait.

* * *

_So no actual time travel this chapter (le gasp) but hey, this chapter was pretty important for __**transitional purposes **__y'know? Hopefully I did the reunion between Sasuke and Naruto well enough, I spent ages on it._


End file.
